SCRAPS OF NATURAL HISTORY

Press, Volume LXVIII, Issue 14308, 20 March 1912, Page 4

SCRAPS OF NATURAL HISTORY

.WEKAS

(By Canterbury.)

(SPECIALLY WRITTEN* FOR "THE PRESS."). IX Our old familiar acquaintance, tho weka, tho "Maori-hen, is growing scarcer by swift degrees and sorrowfully fewer. They wore nice friendly" companionable birds, sometimes apparently the only occupants of a dreary frost-bound bush, but the progress of sheep-dogs and small settlements has not been to their taste. Tho sheep-dogs considered that they made fine sport after tho work of tho day was finished, they wero supposed to bo "good for gun-oil," and ordinarily you shot a weka for practice and for fear ho might do harm. Now ho just isn't' there, and people aro to bo found, who regret his absence. Some people even ate the weka, I did once; we shot him, and half boiled him, and then fried him, and said ho was " real good"—just like chicken—only on the morrow I saw his relations happy with the household drains, and truly wifihed I hadn't. Where any game >is left in Canterbury, tho protectors' thereof are not sorry for the decreased numbers of tho weka, for undoubtedly ho was fond of pheasant's eggs, and on discovering a nest would promptly make trial- *'if they Woro fresh." Bar this fancy of his tribo for detecting " bad eggs," the ■weka might bo converted to a sporting frame of mind as in the following note:—There is a country houso in Canterbury whereof tho family is chiefly boys, and after the manner of boykind they rejoiced in a whole collection of small firearms, w*ith which they wrought against tho raids of blackbirds and thrushes upon tho garden. Sometimes they slew " because blackbirds aro good eating," and would make part of an extra uncounted meal; but more often the matter took the form of a personal feud " who is to have most fruit, mc or the bird?" and the feathered raiders' "were left on the ground whe.ro they fell. A family of wekas lived in some bush near the fruit garden, and it may bo supposed that m the course of their quests for food found somo dead blackbirds and likewise found them " good eating." After that they began to keep watch among the fruit shrubs for "another of the same" and unscared by the sound of a shot, were able 1 occasionally to mark down a bird and proceed accordingly. Gradually the wekas were accepted as

familiar friends by tho boys, and thus being froo from harm, they came to associato the firing of a gun and tho falling- of a bird, which might stay where a persevering weka might find it. At length, whenever a shot was fired a quaint epoctaclo was on view; the whole family of maori-hens rushing pell-mell from any part of the- garden whore weka-affairs had called them, to the spot whero they could sportingly act as "retrievers" and perhaps mako suro of a meal. When a couple of them dropped on the spoil at onco, tho scramble •that always followed, was enough to mako them thick friends with any pro-perly-constructed boy. I do hate to end up a noto unhappily but the fact must bo said and this happy family of wekas. went one by ono tho way of their kind. Wait a moment, possibly they followed tho fashion of the hour, ami emigrated to tho further-bush, whero in somo gully cleft among the hills they may still devour dead pig and livo in peaco: weka-pcace.