SCIENTISTS ON ISLANDS.

Press, Volume LX, Issue 18263, 23 December 1924, Page 5

SCIENTISTS ON ISLANDS.

INTERESTING DISCOVERIES. During, the past week Professor JameS'R. Kirk, president of the New Zealand Institute, Mr H. Hamilton, of the Wellington. Museum, and Mr W. Mackenzie Eraser, honorary curator, camped on the Poor Knights and Hen and Chickens Islands, states a Whangarei correspondent. Their mission was a scientific investigation of. .what these atolls- could disclose. They found specimens wf Maori woven cloth on the Poor Knights. "These we're relics of the N»atiawa tribe, nicknamed the "Kidgepolers," because they shifted quarters "so qften. They were massacred by raiders. Descendants of the few survivors are easily recognisable in the north to-day, mainly by the fact that their hair has-an auburn tinge. The scientists also established the fact that Buller's shearwater was to be found on those islands and that the saddleback, a small songbird which was generally believed to be extinct, was present "in fairly large numbers on the Hen.