The Honey-eaters : The Tui 
115 
feet of my head, as he turned from my unexpected presence, 
shocked me into a thought of the descent of the great roc. 
The same thing happened on another occasion with a long-tailed 
cuckoo; and on yet another occasion, a quail started from my 
very feet with a resounding and heart-shocking whirr; and the 
Maori had experienced the same, for his scattered thoughts 
would gather into the proverb, Re kokoreke puoho tata (G-K, 
p. 18). “Even a quail startles by springing up quite close to 
you, ’ ’—which has also passed into a saying, meaning to dis¬ 
comfit the enemy. Hardly a writer on New Zealand but has had 
a word for the tui, his melodious song, his cacophanous articula¬ 
tions, his pantomimic gestures. He was a favourite both with 
the Maori and the early colonist, and both kept him as a cage 
bird: he proved docile and cheerful in captivity,—a great mimic 
at all times. He was known as the mocking-bird in 1840, when 
one Peter Brown, a colonist, wrote to his friend in England, 
4 4 The mocking bird is the same as your blackbird, with a white 
tuft below the head.” (N.Z.J. 1840, p. 223). 
E. J. Wakefield (WA, pp. 58-9), too, knew him as the mocking¬ 
bird. 44 The little birds,” he writes, 44 were chiefly the tui, or 
mocking-bird. Its most common note is a mixture of two 
or three graduated notes on a flute, a sneeze, and a sharp whistle, 
but it imitates almost every feathered inhabitant of the forest, 
and, when domesticated, every noise it hears.” Again, a 
colonist writing home on 20th January, 1851, (CP, p. 310), 
says:— 44 .the tui, or parson-bird, or mocking-bird, as it is 
indifferently called. Nothing, not even the nightingale, can 
approach the sweetness of this tui when he sings his own 
song.” 
Other cooks beside the great discoverer, too, have noted that 
his flesh is delicious, and a great deal might be written about the 
Maori method of snaring and preserving the tui and other birds 
during their season, for birds were valuable articles of food with 
them —but my concern is with the delight they give to the ear 
and eye; not to the palate. When writing of birds I have not 
heard, or heard seldom, I have quoted what others have sail 
regarding their song; but as I have heard the tui, and hav e seen 
