HABITS OF THE KEA 
parrots, and in that position we shall leave it without 
further comment. The general aspect of the bird will 
leave no doubt upon the mind of the visitor that he is 
looking at a parrot; but it will probably not occur to 
him that this bird is a murderous fowl, which has as it 
were deliberately trodden the Accipitrine path and 
deserted the innocent and frugivorous ways of most of 
the parrot tribe. Inasmuch as there are, or were, some 
ornithologists who regarded the parrots in general as 
modified hawks, this revived taste for flesh seems to 
have a meaning ; but, on the whole, it is to be pointed 
out that the parrot tribe, whatever their real affinities 
are, are not to be placed anywhere near to the eagles, 
vultures, and hawks, in spite of their hooked beak and 
cere at the nostril. Probably they are to be looked 
upon as nearer to the plantain-eaters of Africa and to 
various allies of those. In days gone by the kea was a 
vegetarian, or at most an insect-eating bird. But 
with the colonization of New Zealand came in due course 
mutton, and the kea adopted the habit of loafing round 
sheep-killing establishments and nibbling at garbage. 
From this comparatively harmless taste the kea found 
it but a short step to murder, and nowadays a herd of 
keas will surround and kill a live sheep, particularly 
perhaps a weakly one. So successful did these raids 
become that the government was invoked to protect 
the farmer and the slaughterer. It seems to have taken 
some time for the kea to develop fully this noxious and 
carnivorous habit. For the facts of its depredations 
were only published for the first time in a scientific 
journal so lately as 1871 ; and the advent of specimens 
at the Zoo have never failed to elicit from the daily 
press further comments on what is indeed a genuinely 
remarkable fact. It is frequently remarked in such 
communications that the goal of the kea’s bill is the 
kidney fat. It is true that the lumbar region is the one 
it 
