Ramble along Nature's Highway

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 151, 27 June 1936, Page 6 (Supplement)

Ramble along Nature's Highway

Nesting wrybills are covered with fine silky down, which is pale grey, speckled with black in colour above, and white on the under surface. Does the wrybill's beak only curve in the process of growing up? No, for even the smallest chicks are all "wrvbills." Their beaks also bend to the right.

A good observer, T. H. Potts, says that the wrybill's curved beak is very useful to its owner. When it is "feeding the flexibility of the upper mandible derived from the long grooves and flattened form tends naturally to assist the bird in fitting its curved bill close to a stone, and thus aids it in searching or fossicking around or beneath the shingle for its food, while at the same time the closed mandibles would form a tube through which water and insects could be drawn up as water is sucked up by a syringe." He goes on to say that, as the bill is bent sideways, "the bird is enabled to follow up retreating insects by making the circuit of a water-worn stone with far greater ease than if it had been furnished with the straight beak of the plover, or the long, flexible scoop of the avocet."

The avocet is a bird whose bill is curved upwards, the bill of the curlew has a downwards sweep, but only the wrybill, no matter how many birds you consider, has a bill bent to one side.

If you want to see the wrybill, you will have to sort it out from the other birds of similar size and habits —chiefly dottrels —which also feed in flocks about the mud flats.

A bird so remarkable as this wrybill, the Ngutu parore of the Maoris, is worth seeing. Do not make the mistake of looking for it in Auckland between August and March, for it is then in the South Island, perhaps in Canterbui'y, for the summer.