OBSERVATIONS OF NOTORNIS

Press, Volume XCI, Issue 27563, 21 January 1955, Page 10

OBSERVATIONS OF NOTORNIS

Failure To Identify Bird

FIORDLAND “PIONEERS” OF 1930’S

The notornis had been known to men as a living bird for more than 10 years before it was rediscovered by Dr. G. B. Orbell on November 20, 1948. Two men, named Evans and Morell, who lived in the Te Anau district, occasionally saw the birds, referred to them as “those queer birds” if they spoke of them at all, and did not realise they were thought to be extinct. “These men were pioneers in the extreme,” said Mr R. H. Wheeler, lecturer in geology at Victoria University College, in Christchurch yesterday. Mr Wheeler returned yesterday from Fiordland with members of the Canterbury Museum expedition to the area. Men of this type were hard and strong; they loved the bush and knew it as well as the townsman knew his own back yard, said Mr Wheeler. But they often had little education, and did not talk of what they saw. Both Mr Wheeler and Mr B. W. Collins, District Geologist in Christchurch, spoke appreciatively of the way the expedition members had been helped and encouraged by the public. “Everyone between here and Te Anau seemed to know who we were and what we had set out to do,” he said.