THE BIG FIVE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 235, 3 October 1936, Page 24 (Supplement)

THE BIG FIVE.

By E. G. TURBOTT.

ALSO ABOUT ZOOS.

ONE place at which we can actually meet animals is the zoo. Doubts may never have entered your head as to whether keeping birds and beasts in is a good procedure. Men are great interferers with Nature. I think of modern zoos as experiments of ours in which we do our best to understand living things at second-hand, and under our con-

trol; because it is hardly possible for most of us to see everything "in the original." At the zoo you can see such things as the emus nesting (about which they do not take much trouble), but you cannot see the birds running at full 6peed when a car "had to touch 35 miles an hour" before it caught up. You must always remember at zoos that you have to be content with seeing only a little of wiat the animals can do. I have obtained a picture of a blueRecked cassowary. He is one of the big five. Here they are: The emu of j

Austrj lia, the cassowary of Australia and the East Indies, the ostrich of South Africa, the rhea, or South American ostrich, and the New Zealand kiwi. Only five—the flightless, running birds, all of southern lands. Being non-flyers they have no big wing muscles and do not need the ridge of bone down the breast to support them. One thing you can do if you have ever watched a kiwi. Go to the zoo and compare its actions with those of the emu or cassowary, or whatever running bird they possess.. Perhaps you have forgotten how remarkable the kiwi really is because it is familiar.

Zoos can be useful in a way which is mentioned in the new magazine of the Zoological Society of London, palled '"Zoo," now on sale in New Zealand: "Mr. David Seth-Smith, curator of birds and mammals, is attempting to introduce ruffs into England once more, via the zoo. Once they were a common bird here, as they are now in Holland, but were exterminated by thoughtless shooting. Mr. Seth-Smith liae released several pairs in remote parts of the countryside, and hopes that they will breed and once more establish themselves."