XXV111 



INTEODUCTION. 



abounding on every plain and valley throughout that extensive region. Till recently, two living- 

 representatives— the only known survivors of the race — were kept in captivity, but these have 

 now gone, and the species is extinct! Within the memory of man the buffalo roamed in 

 hundreds of thousands over the boundless prairies of America. Where are they now ? To quote 

 a vigorous writer — "What would not an enlightened administration in Washington now give 

 to recall alive to the vast plains of the West those glorious herds of Nature's cattle which 

 were their ornament and their wealth? Nothing remains of them to-day except their horns 

 sadly bleaching by the side of rail and roadway. The heedless egotism of the Yankee 

 pioneer and settler has for ever banished from the American landscape its noblest and most 

 interesting adornment, and, except a few miserable specimens kept half tame in the Yellowstone 

 Park, nothing is now to be seen of the proud, free and handsome North American bison." The 

 same thing is happening to-day with the noble elephant of Africa. Through the reckless 

 slaughter by so-called sportsmen, and the traders' insatiable greed for ivory, this " colossal 

 race of an antique w T orld " is fast being hurried to its doom. Unless there is speedy inter- 

 vention to save the elephant, " the Libyan forests, which furnished the armies of Carthage," 

 will soon be silent, and the noble beast will pass away from the Veldt as completely as the bison 

 has done from the American prairie. And so with birds of different kinds all over the world. 

 Species that even twenty years ago were plentiful are becoming scarcer every year, and many of 

 them will be entirely extinct before the present generation of man has passed away. It is the 

 fashion with naturalists to mourn over the extinction of the Dodo, which abounded on the Island 

 of Mauritius in the early part of the seventeenth century, and to bewail the extermination of the 

 Great Auk, or (rare-fowl, which existed in Iceland at one time in countless numbers, and did not 

 become extinct till about 1844. So keen, indeed, is the regret as to the latter, and so eager the 

 desire of collectors to possess some relic of a vanished form, that I have known as much as £300 

 paid for a single egg of this ungainly bird. But how few of us realise fully what is happening 

 around us in our own favoured Colony ! Look at our native birds. Not very long ago I 

 received a letter from a leading naturalist on the Continent, in which he says : "I have always 

 regarded the avifauna of New Zealand as the most interesting in the whole world. I was, there- 

 fore, delighted to read your spirited appeal to the authorities to do something, if only to save a 

 remnant of it ; and, failing that, to get representative collections in all the local museums before 

 it is too late. The cost of this great and imporant work would be comparatively trifling — less, in 

 fact, than the expense of equipping a small gunboat for active service in your waters." And this 

 estimate of the New Zealand Avifauna is no mere figure of speech. It contains so many 

 anomalous genera — so many types of ancient forms or connecting links with a fauna of the past 

 — that its study is of the highest interest to the philosophic naturalist. And what is happening 

 at this moment ? All the more interesting of these forms are passing away ! Not a few 

 species have already been exterminated, many more are on the borderland, so to speak, of final 

 extinction, and some even of the commonest birds of five-and-twenty or thirty years ago have 

 become so scarce that it is difficult to know where to look for them. The saddest part of it is that 

 it seems hopeless now to arrest the evil. After much supine neglect, the Government was at last 

 roused to take action, and, by extending the provisions of the ' Wild Birds Protection Act,' it 

 shielded, to some extent, species that were being indiscriminately destroyed ; but those most in 

 need of protection have become exposed to the deadliest of natural enemies by the introduction, at 

 the instance of a former Government, of stoats, weasels and ferrets — bloodthirsty animals that 

 are now swarming over every part of the country and defy all attempts to check their increase. 

 The intention, of course, was to find some remedy for the wild-rabbit nuisance ; but it is notorious 

 that these marauders will not take fur when they can get feather. From all parts of both Islands 

 I have received intelligence of the ravages of these animals, and, being now thoroughly established 

 in the country, it will be impossible ever to eradicate them. 



