164 BIRD LIFE ON ISLAND AND SHORE 
indifference to their provant; like all healthy 
young things, they were ever ready for food. 
For several weeks, like the Fat Boy of Dingley 
Dell, they slept interminably except when roused 
for meals. At the date of our sailing they had 
still to be awakened when twenty-one days old 
or more. Almost all nestlings can be animated 
by artifice: a gentle jar of the twigs supporting 
the nest or a touch of the head, but it was rarely 
possible thus to deceive the youthful Saddleback. 
On one or two occasions only some incitement 
unknown to me would cause the long necks to 
stretch up and the yellow gapes to open wide. 
These strange youngsters were, moreover, not 
only always sleepy, but always silent, different in 
this respect to youthful Tui, Bellbirds, and Robins, 
who know presumably that they would not be 
fed at all unless the coast was clear, and that 
therefore they may give vent within reason to 
childish supplication. 
Although the arrival of the feeding birds was 
most deliberate and most open, the actual offer of 
food to their chicks was conducted with a certain 
curious diffident bashfulness—in fact, though such 
a statement may sound strange indeed to the 
ears of some folk, again and again I was made 
to feel as if in witnessing the action I had been 
taken into the bird’s confidence, that what I saw 
was a secret between the male, especially the 
