The Owl ParrOtt {Stngops HahroptUus) 



By Joseph Grinnell 



Length: About 22 inches. 

 Range : New Zealand. 



The Australian continent and New Zealand, as everybody knows, are the 

 countries where everything goes by contraries. And it is here that one parrot group 

 has developed some of its most curious offshoots. One would imagine beforehand 

 that no two birds could be more unlike in every respect than the gaudy, noisy, 

 gregarious Cockatoos and the Somber Nocturnal Owls. Yet the New Zealand 

 Owl Parrot is a lory which has assumed all the appearances and habits of an owl. 

 A lurker in the twilight or under the shades of night, burrowing for its nest in 

 holes in the ground, it has dingy brown plumage like the owls, with an under- 

 tone of green to respect its parrot origin ; while its face is made up of two great 

 disks, surrounding the eyes, which succeed in giving it a most marked and 

 unmistakable owl-like appearance. Why should a parrot so strangly disguise 

 itself and belie its ancestry? The reason is not difficult to discover. It found a 

 place for itself ready-made in Nature, New Zealand, a sparsely-stocked island, 

 peopled by various forms of life from adjacent but still distant continents. There 

 are no dangerous enemies there. Here, there was a great opportunity for a 

 nightly prowler. The owl parrot, with true business instinct, saw the opening 

 clearly laid before it, and took to a nocturnal and burrowing life, with the natural 

 consequence that more forms survived which were dingy in color. Unlike the 

 owls, however, the Owl Parrot, true to the vegetarian instincts of the whole 

 lory race, lives almost entirely upon sprigs and mosses and other creeping plants. 

 It is thus essentially a ground bird ; and as it feeds at night in a country possess- 

 ing 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 rock or 

 tree to its accustomed breeding ground. 



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