SOME SPORTS.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 119, 22 May 1928, Page 6

SOME SPORTS.

A certain species of sportsman is having a glorious time of it this shooting season. The other day near Palmerston North two gunmen shot thirty-five pukeko. Down at Paraparaumu, on the Manawatu line, a resident had made pets of two pukekos, who made camp near their house and came to be fed. That was all right, until the shooting season opened. Then some sport came along with a gun and bagged the brace of them. The person who had befriended the two beautiful and trusting swamp hens wrote indignantly to the papers about it, which must have greatly amused the man with the gun. The removal of State protection from the harmless pukeko is unfortunately likely to result in the extermination in many places of a bird whose haunts have been narrowed greatly by the draining of the swamps and lagoons. There are no vast expanses of fenland to shelter the water birds now, and so they are found nearer the homes of man and fall a too easy victim to the Cockney brand of gunner. It is difficult to find any excuse for this official relaxation of the law that once put the pukeko in sanctuary. It is no more justifiable to remove this measure of protection than it would be to proclaim an open season for the shooting of tui and wild pigeon. Report says that a farmer got annoyed at the pukeko pulling some straws out of his stack, whereupon there was a demand that the birds be shot out immediately in order to prevent the ruination of the great staple industries. I have seen the tui and the bellbird feasting on the ripe pears in a Banks Peninsula garden, but the owner of those pears did not grudge them their little share of the fruit. He would have been as indignant at the idea of shooting them as that Paraparaumu homesteader was at the murder of his pet birds. As for those Palmerston North sports, I have been thinking out a suitable method of recognising their prowess. They should have been condemned to camp alongside their bags until they had eaten everyone of those thirty-five pukeko. —J.C.