WRYBILLS AND WINTER.

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

WRYBILLS AND WINTER.

AN OUTSTANDING BIRD. By E. G. TURBOTT, B.Sc. WE do not all notice the points from which scientists of experience know how the species of animals are related and how they differ. The wrybill plover is a bird whose difference can be "seen with half an eye." His beak is permanently bent sideways, the bend being to the right hand. Thus the world takes notice of him. He is the only bird with a beak bent like that. All the same, he has points which are the same in other plovers, and it is to these wading birds that he is most closely allied. At the present time the wrybill (Anarhynckus frontalis) is in the north for the winter. Not in the north of the world like the godwits and golden plovers, and not even to our north in the tropical Pacific like the cuckoos. The wrybill is known to breed only in the South Island of New Zealand, but it spends the winter in the North Island. Thus it makes a seasonal movement, or migration, within New Zealand. For its breeding place, the wrybill has selected the shingly river beds of the South Island. Its eggs, pale green with dark lines and blotches, are quite safely concealed there among the rounded stones which border those great torrents right down from the mountains; and it is just as hard to see the wrybill itself since dark grey above an< l white below are its colours, except for the broad black band across its chest. The upper surface of the adult bird is rather like a grey stone, while the breast, with its dark band, resembles a white stone and its shadow. The setting in which it lives changes to mud and sand flats in harbours the North. Quoy and Gaimard, on board the French exploring ship Astrolabe in 1827, first discovered the remarkable bird in small flocks on mud flats in the Hauraki Gulf. It is still moderately plentiful.