84 PRETTY POLL. 



other creeping plants. It is thus essentially a ground 

 bird ; and as it feeds at night in a country possessing no 

 native beasts of prey, it has almost lost the power of 

 flight, and uses its wings only as a sort of parachute to 

 break its fall in descending from a rock or tree to its 

 accustomed feeding-ground. To get up again, it climbs, 

 parrot-like, with its hooked claws, up the surface of the 

 trunk or the face of a precipice. 



Even more aberrant in its ways, however, than the 

 burrowing owl-parrot, is that other strange and bated 

 New Zealand lory, the kea, which, alone among its 

 kind, has abjured the gentle ancestral vegetarianism of 

 the cockatoos and macaws, in favour of a carnivorous 

 diet of singular ferocity. And what is odder still, this 

 evil habit has been developed in the kea since the 

 colonization of New Zealand by the English, those most 

 demoralizing of new-comers. The settlers have taught 

 the Maori to wear tall hats and to drink strong liquors : 

 and they have thrown temptation in the way of even the 

 once innocent native parrot. Before the white man 

 came, in fact, the kea was a mild-mannered fruit-eating 

 or honey-sucking bird. But as soon as sheep-stations 

 were established in the inland these degenerate parrots 

 began to acquire a distinct taste for raw mutton. At 

 first, to be sure, they ate only the sheep's heads and offal 

 that were thrown out from the slaughter-houses picking 

 the bones as clean of meat as a dog or a jackal. But in 

 process of time, as the taste for blood grew upon them, a 

 still viler idea entered into their wicked heads. The 

 first step on the downward path suggested the second. 

 If dead sheep are good to eat, why not also living ones ? 



