454 
MEMOIR 
ON THE 
FOOD, NESTS, AND TRADITIONS 
OF THE 
MOAS (DINORNIS). 

THE generation of the natives of New Zealand has passed away who received the 
traditions of ancestors to whom the living Moas were familiar; but such traditions 
have been fortunately collected by colonists who have mastered the Maori dialects, and 
from these I have selected notices of the living habits, the food, and nidification of the 
now extinct species of Dinornis which seemed most worthy of addition to a scientific 
record of that singular genus of huge wingless birds. 
It is scarcely necessary to remark that no evidence of this genus has been met with 
in any other part of the world than the islands now called “‘ New Zealand.” 
Sir George Grey, K.C.B., in a letter to the Zoological Society of London, read 
24th February, 1870, communicated interesting results of his intercourse with the 
Maoris, while Governor of New Zealand, and since his return to that colony as a 
resident in the North Island. 
Sir George writes:—“ The natives all know the word ‘ Moa’ as describing the 
extinct bird; and when I went to New Zealand twenty-five years ago, the natives 
invariably spoke to me of the Moa as a bird well known to their ancestors. They 
spoke of the Moa in exactly the same manner as they did of ‘ the Kakapo’ (S¢rigops), 
‘the Kiwi’ (Apteryz), ‘the Weka’ (Ocydromus), and an extinct kind of Rails (Aptornis ?, 
Notornis?) in districts where all these birds had disappeared.” Sir George, who is an 
accomplished scholar in the melodious Polynesian dialect of the Maoris, proceeds to 
state :—‘ Allusions to the Moa are to be found in their poems, sometimes together 
with allusions to birds still in existence in some parts of the islands. From these cir- 
cumstances, and from former frequent conversations with old natives, I have never 
entertained the slightest doubt that the Moa was found by the ancestors of the present 
New-Zealand race when they first occupied the islands, and that, by degrees, the Moa 
was destroyed and disappeared, as have been several other wingless birds from different 
