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THE KIWI AND ITS EGGS 
humoured not drove.” In harmony with its crepuscu- 
lar and nocturnal life the kiwi is coloured of sad browns 
and greys, a mode of coloration which we meet with 
in owls and goatsuckers, equally nocturnal as a rule in 
habit. The name apteryx is quite a misnomer. The 
kiwi has wings, though they are very minute and hidden 
by its long feathers; these lack the firmness of the 
feathers of other birds by reason of the fact that the 
branches of the main axis of the feather, the barbs, 
lack those secondary branches hooked together called 
the barbules. The bones of the wing are, however, 
like those of other birds, save for the fact that only one 
of the three fingers found in the wings of other birds 
is at all well developed. The long bill of the kiwi and 
its relationship, as it is thought, to the ostriches, has 
led to the apt German vernacular name of “ Schnepfe- 
strauss,’ or “snipe ostrich,” an appellation which is 
clearly more descriptive than apteryx. It is this long 
bill which is used in probing for earthworms, and it has, 
contrary to what is found in other birds, the two nostrils 
situated quite at the end. This allows the bird to 
snuff down into the hole it is probing for the earth- 
worm, and it appears indeed that the kiwi has a better 
sense of smell than most birds. Smell, indeed, is a sense 
in which birds generally are apt to be deficient; they 
make up for it by extreme keenness of vision. The 
apteryx is one of those birds, and here it agrees with 
other ostrich-like birds, in which the female is the 
more agressive of the sexes, while the male is more re- 
tiring and attends to the duties of incubation. The 
nest is a scooped out hole in the ground and in it are 
deposited, or rather zs deposited, the enormous egg. 
It is a fact that proportionately the egg of the apteryx 
is the largest known, being not even exceeded by that 
of the roc or Aepyornis, or, more paradoxically, by the 
smallest egg in actuality in the bird series, i.e. that of 
220 
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