PRETTY POLL. 83 



Australia and New Zealand, as everybody knows, are 

 the countries where everything goes by contraries. And 

 it is here that the parrot group has developed some of 

 its strangest and most abnormal offshoots. One would 

 imagine beforehand that no two birjs could be more 

 unlike in every respect than the gaudy, noisy, gregarious 

 cockatoos and the sombre, nocturnal, solitary owls. 

 Yet the New Zealand owl-parrot is, to put it plainly, a 

 lory which has assumed all the outer appearance and 

 habits of an owl. A lurker in the twilight or under the 

 shades of night, burrowing for its nest in holes in the 

 ground, it has dingy brown plumage like the owls, with 

 an undertone of green to bespeak its parrot origin : while 

 its face is entirely made up of two great disks, surrounding 

 the eyes, which succeed in giving it a most marked 

 and unmistakable owl-like appearance. 



Now, why should a parrot so strangely disguise itself 

 and belie its ancestry ? The reason is plain. It found 

 a place for it ready made in nature. New Zealand is a 

 remote and sparsely-stocked island, peopled by mere 

 casual waifs and strays of life from adjacent but still 

 very distant continents. There are no dangerous 

 enemies there. Here, then, was a clear chance for a 

 nightly prowler. The owl-parrot with true business 

 instinct saw the opening thus clearly laid before it, and 

 took to a nocturnal and burrowing life, with the natural 

 consequence that it acquired in time the dingy plumage, 

 crepuscular eyes, and broad disk-like reflectors of other 

 prowling night-fliers. Unlike the owls, however, the 

 owl-parrot, true to the vegetarian instincts of the whole 

 lory race, lives almost entirely upon sprigs of mosses and 



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