66



Sydney Porter—Notes on New Zealand Birds



of its haunts it will never be shot out, but there are few spots now in

the South Island of New Zealand where the sheep farmers have not

penetrated, and the Kea is to the average sheep farmer what a red

rag is to a bull. Other observers state that the Kea will linger on

only in the places where it is protected. I am not in a position to

make a statement either way except that in passing through a great

portion of the Southern Alps I only saw this parrot at Mount Cook

where it is protected.


If it does become extinct, perhaps they will tell us that, after all r

it might have been a mistake about its carnivorous habits, but it

will be too late then !


Everything is being done to foster the idea about the Kea’s feeding

upon mutton. Children in schools are taught about a horrible

rapacious bird which feeds on the kidneys of living sheep. People

who should know very much better have cases set up in museums

with half a dozen Keas in the act of devouring the carcass of a lamb

heavily daubed with crimson paint.


Most people, naturalists included, love to add a little sensationalism,

often at the expense of truth, to what otherwise appears to them dry

scientific fact. Any out-of-the-way trait in the life of an animal is

at once seized upon and enlarged beyond recognition, such as the

fictitious remnants of the third eye in the Tuatara (Sphenodon

punctatum) a very rare and primitive form of lizard found only on one

or two islands off the East coast of New Zealand. And so it is with

the Kea, the association of this bird and sheep seems inseparable.

Every time we see a Kea pictured in a scientific book, in the back¬

ground there are usually two of these “ monsters ” in the very act

of tearing out the kidneys of a sheep. To my mind it would be just as

incongruous to represent human beings every time they were pictured,

to be feasting on a mutton chop, and I’m sure that humans are far

more entitled to be shown eating sheep than these parrots. For

the majority of people feed at least once or twice a week on a sheep’s

carcass, and that is far more than the average Kea does. In fact,

I still have to be convinced that this bird kills sheep at all. No

one I ever met had ever seen a Kea kill a sheep, except one man

whom I met, who said that he had seen two hundred killed in a night t



