81 
part of June of the same year would seem to indicate another incursion from the South Island at 
that date *. 
The bird whose history has been so fully recorded in these pages being once fairly established 
among us, it has continued to increase and multiply, and now it disputes possession of our gardens 
and hedgerows with the introduced Sparrows and Finches, and indeed swarms all over the country. 
On my last visit to the Hot Lakes I found it extremely abundant everywhere ; even amid the noxious 
fumes at Sulphur Point I met with small flocks flitting about in the stunted manuka scrub, and 
apparently quite at home in sulphuretted hydrogen ! In the Bay of Plenty district it is particularly 
plentiful, so much so as to form an article of food to the natives. They are in season in the months 
of March and April, and are then collected in large numbers, singed on a bush fire to take the 
feathers off, and forthwith converted into huahua and potted in calabashes. The catching is effected 
in a very primitive way. The birds have their favourite trees upon which they are accustomed to 
congregate. Selecting one of these, the bird-catcher clears an open space in the boughs and puts up 
several straight horizontal perches, under which he sits with a long supple wand in his hand. He 
emits a low twittering note in imitation of the birds’, and, responding to the call, they cluster on the 
perches, filling them from end to end. The wand is switched along the perch, bringing dozens down 
together, and a boy on the ground below picks up the stunned birds as they fall. Captain Mair, 
when visiting Ruatahuna on one occasion, had brought to him, by two Urewera lads, a basket con- 
taining some five or six hundred of these little birds which had been killed in the manner described. 
In front of the Rev. Mr. Spencer’s house at Tarawera, in a hedge of Laurustinus, scarcely six 
yards from the door, upwards of twenty nests of Zosterops were found at one time, each containing 
from three to five eggs (generally the former) of a lovely blue colour. Usually, however, these birds 
do not breed in communities, but scatter themselves in the nesting-season. 
My son discovered a nest, containing three eggs, attached to a fern-stalk at the very edge of a 
boiling and steaming fumarole, near the White Terrace of Rotomahana, and suspended as it were in 
the midst of a perpetual vapour-bath. 
In the selection of its breeding-home, this bird has manifested with us somewhat erratic tenden- 
cies : thus, for the first three or four years after its permanent location in the North Island, it 
wintered in the low lands and the districts bordering on the sea-coast, and retired in summer to the 
higher forest-lands of the interior to breed and rear its young. In the summer of 1865 a few 
stragglers were observed to remain behind all through the season, and in the following year they 
sojourned in flocks and freely built their nests in our shrubberies and thickets, and even among the 
stunted fern and tea-tree ( Leptospermum ) near the sea-shore. From that time to the present it has 
ranked as one of our commonest birds all the year round; and, what is even more remarkable, it has 
very perceptibly increased in numbers, whilst most of our other insectivorous birds are rapidly 
declining, and threaten ere long to be extinct. 
To the philosophical naturalist the history of the Zosterops in New Zealand is pregnant with 
interest, and I feel that no apology is needed for my having thus minutely recorded it. 
The natives distinguish the bird as Tau-hou (which means a stranger), or Ivanohi-mowhiti (which 
may be interpreted spectacle-eye or ring-eye). It is also called Poporohe and Iringatau, names 
suggested by its accidental or periodical occurrence. 
* Six years later, about the month of July, there was another irruption of the kind, the gardens and shrubberies in and 
around Wellington swarming with them, many hundreds often consorting together in one flock. On this occasion, thej r freely 
visited the poultry enclosures and back-yards in their search for food, and I have counted as many as thirty at one time exploring 
a drain-trap or clustering together on a discarded bone at the dog-kennel, and eagerly tearing off the particles of meat adhering 
to it. As a rule, they seemed to be unusually tame, as if weary after their long flight ; and some of them, emboldened by hunger, 
entered the houses and outbuildings, whilst numbers fell victims to the remorseless cat. 
M 
