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visible movement of the wings, but there is a rapid movement of the head, first to one 

 side, then to the other. When in pursuit of its victims, to compel them to disgorge, the whole 

 character of the bird is changed ; but I had no opportunity of witnessing this, the sea being too 

 calm for fishing. Captain Langdale informed me that a few days before my visit he shot 

 one with his rifle at a considerable altitude, and it came down with a crash on the roof of his 

 house. 



The last instance of its occurrence in New Zealand is recorded in a letter to myself, from 

 Mr. William Townson, of Westport, dated 5th May, 1903, in which he says: "A male 

 Tachypetes aquila was procured on the sea-beach some time back, and came into my possession 

 shortly after it had been killed; it was in fine order, and makes a valuable addition to my 

 collection." 



The Kev. S. J. Whitmee states that on the Ellice Islands this bird is domesticated by 

 the natives. When he was in those islands in 1870 he saw scores of them about the villages 

 sitting on long perches erected for them near the beach. The natives procure the young 

 birds, and tie them by the leg and feed them till they are tame. Afterwards they let them 

 loose, and they go out to sea to get their food, and return to their perches in the villages 

 at intervals. 



Mr. Hedley did not see any tame Frigate Birds at Funafuti, but on Nukulailai, on 

 August 2nd, 1896, he saw one, unattached, on a tall perch in front of the teacher's house. 



The utilisation of this bird as a message carrier between the scattered atolls of the 

 Ellice Group is thus described by the Eev. George Turner* : — 



When I visited the group in 1876, I found that the Samoan native pastors on four of the islands 

 were in the habit of corresponding by means of carrier Frigate Birds. While I was in the pastor's 

 house on Funafuti on a Sunday afternoon, a bird arrived with a note from another pastor on Nukufetau, 

 sixty miles distant. It was a foolscap 8vo leaf, dated on the Friday, done up inside a light piece of 

 reed, plugged with a bit of cloth, and attached to the wing of the bird. In former times the natives 

 sent pearl-shell fish-hooks by Frigate Birds from island to island. I observed they had them as pets 

 on perches at a number of islands in this ' Ellice Group,' fed them on fish, and when there was a 

 favourable wind, the creatures had an instinctive curiosity to go and visit another island, where on looking 

 down they saw a perch, and hence our Samoan pastors, when they were located there, found an ocean postal 

 service all ready to their hand ! 



This statement is confirmed by Mr. C. M. Woodford, who visited the Gilbert Group in 1884, but 

 the Hon. C. B. Swayne, late H.B.M.'s Besident at the Gilbert and Ellice Groups, writes: ' I could never 

 find that the Frigate Bird was used to carry messages between different islands. The old men always 

 laughed at the idea.' 



Mr. Moseley found the Frigate Bird nesting on guano-covered plateaus on Ascension 

 Island, depositing their eggs in the natural hollows. These and the other birds there 

 allowed themselves, on a first visit, to be knocked over with sticks on their nests, but they 

 soon gained experience, and took to flight on being alarmed or molested. 



The Frigate Birds were on the look-out whenever the Gannets were interfered with, 

 and snatched the small fish which they disgorged on these occasions. 



Mr. Moseley remarks that it was striking to find breeding there, in the middle of the 

 Atlantic on the top of a steep volcanic rock, the same assemblage of birds — the Wide- 

 awake Tern, the Frigate Bird, the White Noddy, the Tropic Bird, and Sulci cyanops — as 

 had been met with breeding together on a coral island at sea-level off the north-west coast 

 of Australia, Baine Island. 



* ' Samoa a Hundred Years ago and Long before.' — Turner, 1884, p. 282. 



