160 BIRD LIFE ON ISLAND AND SHORE 
are piled, deep and warm, the shining scales of 
unrolled tree-fern fronds. 
Without exception there were two eggs or two 
young birds in each nest—never more and never 
less. On several occasions the eggs, when not 
covered by the birds, had a leaf or two over them 
_—these leaves, I think, not fallen by chance into 
the nest. Sometimes, too, the eggs appeared to 
be in some degree buried in the nest material. 
They may or may not have been consciously 
hidden—I was never quite able to reach a deci- 
sion on the point. The pairs of eggs seen by me 
differed but little from one another, less indeed 
than do the eggs of many species. In size they 
were rather larger than those of the Tui, blunter, 
and less elegant. Grey was their ground colour, 
the shell thickly blotched all over, but chiefly 
and very clearly marked on the blunt end; there 
the grey blotchings became a blur, tinted with 
violet or purple brown. 
Twenty or twenty-one days is the duration of 
incubation, the birds beginning to sit immediately 
after the second egg has been laid. Thus a nest 
got with two eggs on the 8th November con- 
tained chicks on the 28th. The nest built, as 
already related, in a flax kit had a single egg in 
it on the 9th; on the 10th there were two eggs ; 
on the evening of the 30th the chicks were about 
to emerge. On that evening the hen was so 
