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 is a remote and sparsely-stocked island, peopled by vari- 

 ous forms of life from adjacent but still distant continents. There are no dan- 

 gerous enemies there. Here, then, was a great opportunity for a nightly prowler. 

 The owl-parrot, with true business instinct, saw the opening thus clearly laid 

 before it, and took to a nocturnal and burrowing life, with the natural conse- 

 quence that those 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 of mosses and 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 a tree 

 to its accustomed feeding-ground. To ascend a steep place or a tree, it climbs, 

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

 the precipice. 



Even more aberrant in its ways, however, than the burrowing owl-parrot, 

 is that other strange and hated New Zealand lory, the kea, which, alone among 

 its kind, has adjured the gentle ancestral vegetarianism of the cockatoos and 

 macaws, in favor of a carnivorous diet of remarkable ferocity. And what is 

 stranger still, this evil habit has been developed in the kea since the colonization 

 of New^ Zealand by the British, the most demoralizing of new-comers, as far as 

 all aborigines are concerned. The English settlers have taught the Maori to 

 wear silk 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, 

 the kea was a mild-mannered, fruit-eating or honey-sucking bird. But as soon 

 as sheep-stations were established on the island, these degenerate parrots began 

 to acquire a distinct taste for raw mutton. At first they ate only the oftal that 

 was thrown out from the slaughter-houses, picking the bones as clean of meat as 

 a dog or a jackal. But in course of time, as the taste for blood grew, a new and 

 debased idea entered their heads. If dead sheep are good to eat, are not living 

 ones ? The keas, having pondered deeply over this abstruse problem, solved it 

 in the affirmative. Proceeding to act upon their convictions, they invented a truly 

 hideous mode of procedure. A number of birds hunt out a weakly member of 

 a flock, almost always after dark. The sheep is worried to death by the combined 

 efforts of the parrots, some of whom perch themselves upon the animal's back 

 and tear open the flesh, their object being to reach the kidneys, which they devour 

 at the earliest possible moment. As many as tw.o hundred ewes are said to have 

 been killed in a single night on one ''station" — ranch, we should call it. I need 

 hardly say that the New Zealand sheep-farmer resents this irregular procedure, 

 so opposed to all ideas of humanity, to say nothing of good-farming, and, as a 

 result, the existence of the kea is now limited to a few years. But from a purely 

 psychological point of view, the case is interesting, as being the best recorded 



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