76



J. Cassidy—A Chat about the Kea



same time.”. . . They will often pay a visit of inspection to the

tent and keep one on the qui vive as to what new mischief they will do.

Perhaps you hear them rattling the cooking utensils about. That is

the merest trifle ; but when they begin to tear the tent, there is nothing

to do but to get up and strike camp as soon as possible.


In a book, Climbing in the New Zealand Alps, by Mr. Fitzgerald,

the author says, “ The Kea Parrots disturbed our sleep that night by

walking up the iron roof, and (to judge from the sounds), tobogganing

down and falling off the edge, with shrieks of terror and rage.”


No end of amusing stories are told by travellers in the Kea country

of the instinctive love of mischief in the Kea. There is frequently a

good deal of method in the ways of the bird. One traveller tells how

he was resting on a hill when a Kea alighted on his shoulder. He says :

“ I caught him and put him in a box an inch thick, but he cut it through

by the morning and got out. I then chained him with a dog’s chain,

with a leather strap round his leg. The Kea would run the iron chain

through his beak until he got to the leather and then with a stroke or

two of his beak he cut it right through.” They have marked intelligence

and see through snares and traps of all kinds, and evince clever and

original methods of rendering them useless, seeming, as they fly away,

to screech with wild derision at the would-be trapper.


The Change-over from the Harmless Playful Bird to a

Bird of Prey


“ Before the advent of the white man there were no four-footed

animals in New Zealand, except perhaps, a native rat,” says Malcolm

Ross ; “ my own idea is that it was its inordinate inquisitiveness that

led to the change (in Kea food and habits) which was brought about

in an accidental manner : When the early settlers in the mountains

killed a sheep they spread the skin, woolly-side down, on the stockyard

fence. The ever curious Kea swooped down upon it, and began to tear

it to pieces with his strong sharp beak ”... then came “ the cold

winter, when all the berries were done ” and the snow lay thick, and

no grubs were available. Hard up for dinner the Kea flew down into

the valley and finding no sheep-skins about he went back to the

mountain-side and settled upon a live sheep ;—there he got his dinner !



