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Sydney Porter—Notes on New Zealand Birds



colouring can be seen when the bird is in the forest ; it looks, except

for the black head and breast and the very conspicuous white wing-

coverts, a very dark olive. It is only when a skin is handled that the

brilliant yellow is apparent.


The Stitch-bird never leaves the confines of the deepest forest

groves ; it is also very local in its habitat, only being found in

certain gullies and seldom away from them.


In a letter from a young scientist who remained on the island

after we had gone, he says, “ While having lunch on the way up out

of the Styx gorge a friendly Stitch-bird visited us and made a meal

off the heads of a Gahnia bush close by. Gahnia sp. is a tall £ cutty-

grass ’, a member of Cyperaccce, 3 ft. 6 in. high and bearing large

lax panicles of red brown seeds (nuts), there are five species on Little

Barrier, all similar.”


Unlike many of the endemic birds of New Zealand there is no

record of this bird ever being kept in captivity and there is not the

slightest likelihood of it ever coming into the hands of any aviculturist,

for of all New Zealand’s unique birds this is the most jealously guarded.


The North Island Robin (.Miro longipes)


Some time after the coming of the colonists to New Zealand, these

charming birds began to get rarer and rarer until it was thought that

they had become totally extinct. Buller says in the supplement to the

Birds of New Zealand (1905) : “ I have the mournful satisfaction in

recording that the last heard-of pair of this expiring species was seen

just before I left the Colony in 1898 in the fringe of bush on the northern

side of the Papaitonga Lake . . . the birds were unmolested and

therefore had every chance ; but whether they have left any descendants

or not it is, of course, impossible to say. ... In the olden days it would

have been impossible to enter such a wood without hearing the strident

note of this Robin on all sides.”


As in the case of the Stitch-bird no satisfactory explanation has

ever been given for the disappearance of this bird, except that the

introduced birds acting as the carriers of germs to which they them¬

selves were immune passed the infection on to the indigenous birds, which

quickly succumbed. For the Robin was one of the very few birds which



