418 
MAORI MIDDENS. 
thus assembled, the poor birds would perish in a wholesale 
way : an entire flock at a time would be required to form 
a sufficient feast for such a multitude. The size, too, of 
their eggs being so great, their haunts well known, and of 
necessity contracted in extent, they would have little chance 
of rearing their offspring, as the abundant fragments of 
shells clearly prove. Another cause of their extinction is to 
be traced to the failure of their peculiar food. In Australia 
the bustard, or wild turkey, chiefly feeds upon reptiles, the 
lizard and snake ; the ostrich also does the same in Africa. 
In former days, the lizard was most abundant in New Zea- 
land, and of a much larger size than it is now found ; the 
firing of the country both in hunting and cultivating the 
ground must have greatly diminished the number of the 
larger kinds, which are the most sluggish, and since the 
arrival of the cat they have almost become exterminated. 
In one of my journeys through the interior my natives 
killed a tom cat, which, although almost a skeleton, had 
an immense stomach, this excited my curiosity, I had it 
opened, when, to my astonishment, three dozen lizards 
were taken out, most of them had been swallowed whole, 
and were scarcely injured ; a clear proof of the rapid de- 
vastation the cat, which is now naturalized in the New 
Zealand forests, is making amongst those reptiles, as well 
as the native birds. The guana or tuatara , a lizard eighteen 
inches long, once so abundant, is now only to be met with 
on some of the small isles, and thus the failure of their 
food went hand in hand with their own extinction. But 
is the moa quite extinct ? it evidently was not when the 
European first arrived, and in some of the solitary parts of 
the Middle Island there is clear and trustworthy evidence of 
its footmarks having been met with, and even of its having 
been seen. 
In the year 1863, some men were prospecting for gold in 
the interior of the west coast of the Province of Nelson, 
when early in the morning one of them reported that he 
suddenly came in view of a gigantic bird standing by a 
stream of water ; alarmed, he ran to call his mates, but before 
