ZOOLOGY. 
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• in the forest as well as near the summits of the mountains 
amongst the sub-Alpine vegetation. It is omnivorous, and seems 
to me to he the true scavenger of the country. It despises 
nothin". Bread, flour, bacon, yellow soap, and even the remains 
of its own kindred, are greedily devoured. They quickly find out 
a camp, where their instinct leads them in search of food. 
The woods resound with their call, which consists of two notes 
in the octave, of which the lowest is the first given. We caught 
a great many, as a valuable addition to our stock of provisions. 
The capture is generally made by the means of a flax snare at the 
end of a stick, keeping behind it a smaller bird, at which they run 
pugnaciously, and even when there is no time to take them in 
this way, no small bird being at hand, they come to the snare, 
attracted by a branch rustled on the ground behind it, accom¬ 
panied by an imitation of the notes ot one ol the smaller birds. 
We have even caught them with the hand, by simply exhibiting 
a dead robin. The weka lays four to five eggs, yellowish white, 
with chocolate-coloured spots, of the size of a fowl’s egg, in a nest 
prepared rudely with a few dead leaves and dry grass in a flax 
bush. It breeds in the months of November and December, like 
all the other birds of New Zealand, with the exception of the 
kaka (Nestor meridionalis), which breeds only at the end of sum¬ 
mer, say at the end of February and beginning of March. The 
weka has great affection for its young ones, and it was often with 
the aid of one of them, which were easily caught, that we secured 
the parents, a note of distress from the young bird invariably 
bringing the old ones to its assistance, when they were easily 
caught in the snare held in readiness. 
On the summit of the mountains I met with a very shy bird, 
resembling closely the plover (Charadrius), which till then I had 
never seen. On the lakes, besides the several inhabitants before 
enumerated, we found the crested grebe (Podiceps cristatus?), of 
which only very little is known. 
Another inhabitant of the plains in former years was the kakapo 
(Strigops habroptilus), the night parrot; but it seems that it is 
now nearly extinct there, and that it has found a reluge in the 
wild mountain regions, unmolested by man and dog. In former 
years the Maruia plains were a celebrated hunting ground of the 
Maories for these birds, but we did not even observe their tracks 
in the sand or hear their call, and only in the upper Mawhera-iti 
have a few of late been observed. 
The kakapo lives in holes burrowed in the ground, where it 
remains during the day, coming out in the night; it feeds on 
berries and roots. Although able to fly, it rarely or never takes to 
the wing, as the natives assured me, who in former years often 
hunted it. For this purpose they generally went to the plains, 
when the berries of the tutu (Coriaria sarmentosa) were ripe, 
which are a favourite food of that bird, selecting fine moonlight 
