Sydney Porter—Notes on New Zealand Birds



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hand. They were something like the call of a Guinea-fowl but

much louder and interspersed with numerous other strange cries.

At first we were baffled as to the origin of these calls, but as our

eyes became accustomed to the darkness, we were able to make out

the dusky forms of hundreds of the Petrels, always in couples

chasing each other at an incredible speed. All night long this

continued, and every night afterwards until the early hours

of the morning.


The Petrels nest in deep burrows in the densest virgin forest

above a thousand feet on the mountains of the Little Barrier.

A party of young scientists who were on the island at the same

"time told us that when they climbed up on to the higher ranges

amongst the nests, and camped there the night, the birds kept

coming and going the whole time, running in large numbers over

the sleeping bags. But always in the morning there were numbers

lying about dead, some with their heads chewed off. They thought

that the birds must have crashed against the branches or trunks

of the trees in the dark and were subsequently mauled by either

the large Tuatara lizards or the wild cats.


When on the higher ridges of the mountains, we found innumer¬

able dead Petrels on the track, many of them quite out of the

nesting area. It is a very strange thing that large numbers of

the Cook’s Petrel are always found dead during the nesting

season on the Little Barrier. Other Petrels nest there but no

dead ones are ever found. I have been on other islands where

various other species nest, but this never happens anywhere else.

The only solution to the problem is that the birds appear to fight,

and chase each other in mid-air, and certain ones get killed and

fall into the forest, or, on the other hand, they may kill them¬

selves by striking the trees as they descend into the forest.


High on the ridges in the densest forest, at a height of about

two thousand feet, w r e found innumerable burrow's of this Petrel,

mostly with a single young one in. This we ascertained by putting

a long stick dowm the hole which caused the young one to make

a low grunting noise. We could never reach the birds as the

burrow's Avere too long and the ground too matted with roots



