APPENDIX C 565 



something ridiculous in the fact that the weasel should have arrived on 

 the station before the rabbit, and that later, when rabbits had become 

 numerous, weasels should have practically passed out of the district." 



Mr Guthrie-Smith says that the Australian Quail (Syncecus australis) 

 was privately introduced in the sixties by Colonel Whitmore on Rissington, 

 Hawke's Bay, but did not reach Tutira for more than thirty years. But it 

 seems more likely to me that this bird came to Hawke's Bay from the 

 Wellington Society's importations in 1875-76, for their game farm was 

 in the Wairarapa. 



Again it is said that the Californian Quail was introduced by the Hawke's 

 Bay Provincial Council, and again at a later date by the Hawke's Bay 

 Acclimatisation Society. Unfortunately I have been unable to obtain in- 

 formation from either of those sources. Mr Guthrie-Smith bears out my 

 contention, originally suggested by Mr Cheeseman (see p. 116), that the 

 failure of game birds in New Zealand is due to the food supply being 

 destroyed by small birds. He says: "Californian Quail reached Tutira in 

 the middle nineties, and although there was at first an increase in their 

 numbers, it was a limited increase and soon ceased. Their advent as 

 game-birds had come, in fact, too late to admit of any great success. The 

 competition of innumerable goldfinches, yellow-hammers, larks, sparrows, 

 and native species, several of which had also increased with the enlarged 

 area of open country consequent on the destruction of bracken, had already 

 affected the insect food-supply ; the Californian quail is now disappearing 

 from the run." 



In connection with the naturalisation of the thrush and the blackbird, 

 the spread of these birds in the North Island was almost certainly from 

 Auckland, and Mr Guthrie-Smith gives reasons why their course was right 

 round the coast of the Gulf of Thames, the Coromandel Peninsula, down 

 the Bay of Plenty, round the East Cape, and so to Hawke's Bay, and he 

 illustrates their probable route by an outline map. Mr Philpott's observa- 

 tions in Southland show that the thrush shuns the dense bush, hence the 

 coastal route may have been followed in the case of those which penetrated 

 to Tutira. But he found blackbirds in the heart of the forest country, 

 and I see no reason why both species should not have spread over from 

 the Thames valley direct to the east coast, the intervening strip of bush 

 land being comparatively narrow. 



The sparrow, on the other hand, is stated to have spread from Auckland 

 up the Waikato as far as Taupo, and then across by the line of the Taupo- 

 Napier road. This is quite probable, for the sparrow never seems to stray 

 far from the haunts of men. 



Minahs (Acridotheres tristis) were liberated by the Hawke's Bay Society 

 in 1877, that is, after the Wellington Society's introductions of 1875-76, 

 but they did not increase on Tutira till about 1890, though they became 

 very common about Napier. This bird, like the sparrow, follows man in 

 his migrations, and Mr Guthrie-Smith describes how "upon the approach 

 of autumn, minahs largely use the roads, closing in on homesteads for 

 scraps of fowl-feed and leavings of the gallows and kennels. The species 



