STRANGE BIRDS 359 



still existing there. They are very strange wingless birds, 

 about the size of a large Dorking fowl. The Kiwis are 

 still in existence, but the Moas and some of the other 

 flightless birds have died out since the arrival of the Maori 

 man, who killed and ate them. 



A bird which was believed sixty years ago both by the 

 natives and white men to have become extinct, the Takahe, 

 or Notornis, was known by its bones and from the traditions 

 of the natives. Much to the delight of naturalists, four live 

 specimens of it were obtained at intervals in the last century, 

 the last as late as 1898. The beautiful dark plumage and 

 thick and short beak, which is bright red, as are the legs, are 

 well known from the two specimens preserved in the Natural 

 History Museum. The Notornis is a heavy, flightless 

 " rail." Rails are remarkable for their size and variety in 

 New Zealand, where there are twenty species, some of them 

 very sluggish in flight, or like Notornis, flightless (the 

 wood hens). Amongst the flightless birds of New Zea- 

 land is a duck, as helpless as the heaviest farmyard 

 product, and yet a wild bird, and then there are the 

 penguins, which swim with their wings, but never fly, and 

 belong entirely to the southern hemisphere. Many species 

 are found on the shores of New Zealand. Other note- 

 worthy birds of New Zealand are the twelve kinds of 

 cormorants, the wry-bill plover, the only bird in the world 

 with its beak turned to one side, the practically flightless 

 Kakapo, or ground parrot (Stringops), the Huia, a bird 

 like a crow in appearance, whose male has a short straight 

 beak, whilst the female has a long one, greatly curved ; 

 the detested Kea, the parrot which kills the sheep, intro- 

 duced by the colonists, by digging out with its beak from 

 their backs the fat round the kidneys; also very peculiar 

 owls and wrens, and the fine singing bell-birds. 



The peculiarity of the indigenous animals of New 

 Zealand is seen not only in the absence of mammals and 



