70 Bird-Song : and New Zealand Song Birds 
“.we were rewarded by finding a pair of popokatea, or 
white-head, positively the only ones I have ever heard of on 
the mainland for the last ten years or more. I brought down 
both with a small charge of dust-shot, and have much pleasure 
in exhibiting them. I can remember when the bird was abso¬ 
lutely the commonest and most numerous in the North Island. 
It is now one of the rarest.” It is almost beyond compre¬ 
hension how anyone who professes to be a bird-lover could be 
guilty of such an act, and further, confess to its commission. 
But from the general tenor of Butler’s writing one must con¬ 
clude he was a bird-collector rather than a bird-lover; very 
different from Potts of Canterbury, or Guthrie-Smith of 
Hawke’s Bav. 
«y 
Writing of the white-head and bush-canary, Travers says 
(Tr. Vol. 15, 1883, p. 181) — “The latter is a very different- 
looking and somewhat more robust bird than its North Island 
congener, but notwithstanding this difference in size and the 
greater differences which the two forms present in external 
characters, they both have precisely the same habits and notes. 
The difference between the external characters of the species 
of Petroeca (tom-tit), Turdidae (thrush), Apterygidae (kiwi), 
and Ocydromus (woodhen) peculiar to each of the main islands, 
though less manifest than in the case of the two species of 
Ortliomyx (whitehead and canary) is very well marked, but 
in each of these instances also the notes and habits of the 
birds are the same. In the case of the Corvidae (crow), the 
JNorth Island species is only distinguished from the South 
Island one by its slightly larger size and by the colour of the 
wattles, but in this instance also the notes and habits of the 
birds are identical. It will have been observed, by those who 
have seen them in their natural state, that, with the possible 
exception of Pogonornis cincta (stitch-bird), all the birds of 
flight peculiar to the North Island, and with the exception of 
the two species of Nestor, all those peculiar to the South 
Island, which frequent forest habitats in the respective islands, 
are birds which never voluntarily rise above the level or move 
outside the limits of the forests in which they dwell, and the 
