M 



1 



160 



heads, carefully dried, the beaks of which, hanging down all round and coming into contact 

 make a rattling sound as the wearer moves about. These are called potae huia, and no 

 one but a woman of high rank would presume to wear one. 



There is a nest of this species from the collection of the late T. H. Potts, in the 

 Canterbury Museum. It is a broad, flat nest, looking more like a Shag's nest than any thing- 

 else, and is composed of twigs and fern-stalks, pressed closely together. It has a very wide, 

 shallow cavity roughly lined with soft materials, mostly broad grass leaves. 



In the ' Birds of New Zealand ' (vol. i., p. 17) I have represented in a woodcut a very 

 curious deformity in the bill of a Huia, in which the upper mandible had assumed the form 

 of an erect corkscrew, like the spiral horn of the Strepsiceros. This specimen had been 

 obtained in the Forty-mile Bush, and was minutely described afterwards by the Rev. W. 

 Colenso, F.E.S. ('Trans. N.Z. Inst.,' vol. xix., pp. 140-145). 



More recently the skin of a Huia, with a curiously contorted bill, was brought to me 

 by a Bombay Indian who had been hawking goods in the Wairarapa. He had a very 

 inflated idea of its value, and asked me a correspondingly high price. I could not come 

 to terms with him, as the object had no intrinsic scientific value, but he left it with me long 

 enough to enable me to take a pencil sketch, which I afterwards published in the ' Trans- 

 actions of the New Zealand Institute,' and have much pleasure in reproducing here in a more 

 finished form. 



MALFORMED AND NORMAL BILL OP HETERALOCHA ACUTIROSTRIS, $ 



