AND OTHER BIRDS 53 



sheds, selecting just such sites as the English 

 Red-breast might have chosen. 



There is always, I think, a special interest in 

 noting any little differences in the life habits of 

 the very closely allied species such as, for 

 instance, the Robin of the South Island and the 

 Robin of the North Island. In manner of 

 flight, momentary rigidity, and gymnast's man- 

 ner of holding himself braced at right angles 

 to a vertical stem, the general resemblance is 

 great. 



It is in their singing that the birds chiefly 

 vary, the bird of the North by far eclipsing in 

 this respect his southern relative. The North 

 Island bird on an evening fine after rain, I 

 have heard sing high on a tapering white pine, 

 for half an hour at a stretch, and have been 

 entranced at the variety of the long-continued 

 outpouring of song with its notes of Canary, 

 English Thrush, and English Robin. 



Often my wife and I would ride to the little 

 valley where these fast-disappearing birds then 

 still survived, just to listen to the evening 

 singing; there is no song comparable to it in 

 the whole of New Zealand bush, yet even in dull 

 print its beauties are hardly known; even in 

 books justice has hardly been done, and it has 

 been strangely passed over by early writers, to 

 whom the bird must have been well known. 



The song of the South Island Robin, though 

 it also possesses a note somewhat recalling that 

 of the English Thrush, is not remarkable. 



In January, 1911, I got my first South Island 

 Robin's nest. It rested on one of the wall-plates 

 of a hut in Herekopere Island, and directly I 

 broke the dry flax by which the door was secured 



