46 BIRD BEHAVIOUR 



him by a Maori, and turned them loose into a 

 small room. Here he provided them with decayed 

 logs infested with the boring grubs of a beetle 

 (Prionoplus reticularis), which forms an important 

 part of the Huia's natural food. The birds were 

 tame, and he could easily watch them at work the 

 male chiselling and hacking at the rotten wood, and 

 the hen probing the beetle-burrows where this was 

 too hard for him to cut it away. When, after 

 pecking away at the wood, the male Huia still 

 failed to reach his prey, the hen would come and 

 pull it out with her longer forceps, but, although she 

 had availed herself of his preliminary work, she 

 always ate herself everything she thus got ; be- 

 haviour apparently selfish, but, as we shall see later, 

 quite normal among hen birds. 



The two nevertheless were much attached to 

 each other, and this seems the character of the 

 species ; there is even in Buller's book a figure of 

 a hen Huia whose upper bill, by some accident or 

 natural deformity, had grown into the shape of a 

 corkscrew, so that it can hardly have got enough 

 food to support life naturally (although the Huia 

 eats berries as well as insects) and had evidently 

 been fed for a long time by a devoted mate. 



In this case the hen evidently has the more speci- 

 alized and recent type of bill, and those of the 

 young of both sexes resemble the male's ; and 

 curiously enough, New Zealand presents us with 

 yet another case of female specialization in the case 

 of the local species of Sheldrake (C as arc a variegata) 



