CoLENSo. — On the Moa. 91 



— When you travel, join yourself to the company of the great chief Te Wha- 

 puku, that you may eat of all the choicest delicacies (particularly game and 

 wild fowl) ; — which delicates are stated to be (by an old Maori chief com- 

 menting thirty years ago on this very saying) " birds" (pigeons and tuis) 

 " potted in their own fat in calabashes, parrots, and ground-parrots {kaakaa- 

 poo), rats, and eels, and berries of the tawa and hinau trees." — Another 

 pregnant omission ! 



4. If their old proverbs contained little allusion to the Moa, their old 

 poetry contained still less (as far as is known to me.) And here I may also 

 briefly mention two peculiar quaint poetical ditties of the old Maoris, both 

 being long laments after nice and plentiful food formerly known and eaten ; 

 in which every chief article of pleasant food is severally noticed, together 

 with its habitat. The one being a kind of nursery-song, chaunted to a child 

 while nursing it ; the other the lament of the chief Kahungunu (who lived 

 twenty-one generations back), when away in the cold Patea country in the 

 interior ; in both of which, while mention is made of many bu'ds, no allu- 

 sion whatever is made to the big fleshy food-yielding Moa ! 



5. Moreover, while the ancient Maori possessed charms and spells, and 

 prayers for luck in plenty for everything they did, particularly for fishing 

 and fowhng and the snaring of rats ; and such, too, varied for every dif- 

 ferent animal whether of the land or of the sea ; how is it that there is 

 none for the Moa ? which must by far have been the most difficult to catch 

 or kill ; or, at all events, by far the biggest game of all ! Here we have, 

 still extant, those charms and spells for being successful in taking the 

 various birds — kiivi (Apteryx), kaakaapoo (ground-parrot), koitareke (quail), 

 iveka (wood-hen), kaakaa (brown parrot), kautuku (white heron), huia 

 (Heteralocha), kereru (pigeon), tidi (parson-bird), jo2<A:(?A-o (swamp-hen), parera 

 (duck), ivhio (blue mountain-duck), kaivau (shag), and toroa (albatross) — 

 — besides the various petrels (?) taiko, toanui, tiitii, and oi; some of those 

 charms being also of great antiquity, and yet there is none for capturing 

 the Moa ! This alone has ever been to me an unanswerable argument. 



6. In travelling in the interior of this North Island — largely I may say 

 — more than forty years back, I have often had pointed out to me the old 

 land-marks of the game preserves of the ancient Maori, particularly of the 

 ground game — as quail, kiivi, kaakaapoo (ground-parrot), and weka ; and 

 the mountain-passes where, in the breeding- season, the tiitii (petrel) was 

 taken in a foggy night by firelight ; and also the cliffs on rivers which were 

 smoked and scaled for the fat young of the kaivau (shag) ere they were able 

 to fly ; even then, at that time, some of those birds had become extinct (as, 

 notably, the quail and ground-parrot), the young men had never seen them, 

 but the old ones had, and caught and eaten them too, in great plenty ; and 



