Strange Voices

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 34, 3 November 1934, Page 20

Strange Voices

(B. J. Drummond, F.L.S., F.Z.E., for “The Dominion".)

MIL J. M. AITKEN, of Hamilton, has duties that call him out of doors in the early morning. For a few weeks every year at this time, from about 1 a.m. onwards, he hears the notes of birds that fly overhead. Their line of flight, roughly, is between the PironglaRange, near Hamilton, and the Mainaku Range, inland towards Rotorua. Both have large areas of forest. The birds are never seen, as they fly high, even on clear moonlight mornings. The notes, repeated continually, seem to Mr. Aitken to resemble the notes of the harrier hawk. Some people believe that the birds are swans. His opinion is that they are kakas. They probably are petrels that have homes in deep burrows near the tops of mountains. They may be black petrels. These voyagers and dwellers in the mountains dig burrows in high places on the Little Barrier Island, and occupy Te Mochau and other small northern islands. Many favour coastal cliffs, prominences and headlands on the mainland. Some go inland to the Waitakerei Mountains, near Auckland, to the Rimutakas and other Wellington ranges, and to unfrequented peaks west of Nelson. Mr. Aitken is not the only person who has compared black petrels’ notes to the honking of swans. Anybody who looks over references to black petrels in the literature of sea-hirds will be surprised by the different sounds with which the notes fall on human ears out of the night. To one listener-in they were like the mewing of a cat. Miners in Nelson Pro Vince attributed nocturnal hysterical laughter and screams to black petrels, calling them night demons. A naturalist on the Little Barrier Island set down his impressions in the following words: “The notes are heard high above, and by them the petrels’ courses may be followed until they reach the misty mountain-tops. * As the' notes come through the darkness they seem to belong to some ominous, inauspicious creature, whose presence, bodes no good. They strike the ear as the combination of a soft whistle and a deep whirr coming from the bottom of a husky throat.” A petrel called the Tasmanian mutton-bird, only an occasional visitor to New Zealand according to Dr. W. B. B. Oliver, makes a bewildering din when

it is at. home. It is unbelievably plentiful on islands in Bass Strait and in Tasmania and Victoria. As in New Zealand, so in Bass Strait, mutton-bird-ing is an industry. Some Tasmanian mutton-birds, prepared for the pot, are exported to New Zealand in face of the Stewart Island industry. In a good season, on the Furneaux Islands, Bass Strait. 400,000 young Tasmanian mut-ton-birds are salted down for consumption, but Bishop Montgomery, of ’lasmania, cannot see any probability of the species being exterminated. He estimates that on the Furneaux Islands there are 2,600,000 mutton-birds. He knew of nothing more weird than the homeward rush of countless numbers of mutton-birds on Goose Island. Tens of thousands were whirling, wheeling and flashing up from all sides, in absolute silence. As soon as the majority had arrived, at 7.30 p.m., the ground emitted extraordinary sounds—gurgling, groaning and hoarse laughter. On a summer night a company of naturalists on Phillip Island, fifty miles from Melbourne, broadcast Hie voices of thousands of Tasmanian muttonbirds. Mr. A. 11. Chisholm, in a recent book, details the noveL experience. As dusk fell upon the tea-tree scrub, not a bird was seen. At 7.45 o clock, a solitary bird came from the ocean and dropped on to the sandhills. A few minute's later, hundreds were flying about, as if to get their bearings. There was not the faintest whisper of a bird’s voice. Only two sends broke the stillness. One was the roar of the ocean, the other the sharp whizzing of the wings. The silence of all that rushing life almost inspired awe. As soon as the birds entered their burrows there came, from one burrow after another, croons, chuckles, groans and shrieks. Every laughing-jackass in Australia seemed suddenly to have found itself in the ground and to be uttering a mirthless, laughing protest. At 8.30 o’clock not more than 12 birds remained in the air. At 5.45 only two were aloft, calling, apparently, in distress. All through the night there were cooing, cackling and wailing in the burrows at frequent intervals. With the first hint of dawn a bird emerged from each burrow. They shuffled in a long file to the nearest headland, and put out to sea.