NATURE NOTES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXII, Issue 18949, 21 February 1925, Page 1 (Supplement)

NATURE NOTES.

TWO INTERESTING ISLANDS.

BY J. DKUMMONO, I'.Z.S.

Ono of the strangest cases of matesliip known is on Karewa Island, about .seven miles from the entrance to Tauranga Harbour. The mates are petrels and tuataras. Mr. G. K. A. Biltcliff, of Christchurch, a member of a party who visited that interesting little island at the end of December, saw several tuataras sharing petrels' burrows. The birds were sitting, each on a single egg. The pair in each case, Mr. Biltcliff states, seemed to be on the best of terms, although he was told that a tuatara occasionally made a meal of a young petrel. Describing the tuataras' habits, he states that although they are believed to be very sluggish and slow they can move quickly wheii they make up their minds to do so; but after they arc handled they become dull, seem stupid, and move slowly.

The petrels that share their homes with' tuataras apparently arc flesh-footed shearwaters, known to Maoris as taonui. Mr. Biltcliff and his friends saw the first o£ that species' burrows, which riddle the ground about fifty feet above the shore. Burrows of diving petrels are found in the higher parts of the island. Even with the flesh-footed shearwaters, every bird does not make friends with a tuatara, and it should not be assumed that the matesliip between the birds and the reptiles is general. It does not seem to have been noted on any place where flesh-footed shearwaters or other petrels and tuataras live except Karewa. The flesh-footed shearwaters' burrows almost always are beneath taupata coprosma shrub, which grows freely on parts of the island. The birds, to reach their burrows, must drop through the leaves. A trap often is made by interlacing twigs. Members of the party saw a dead shearwater, caught in the fork of a shrub by one foot. A young pied shag was seen on the shore, also a few blue herons, or white-fronted herons.

In the evening the party landed on Mayor Island, another ornament of the Bay of Plenty. In Opo Bay, from pohutukawa trees that fringe the cliffs, they heard the bellbirds' beautiful notes. People who wish to see New Zealand's crimson-flowered Christmas trees at the height of their glory should visit Mayor Island. Mr. Biltcliff writes enthusiastically of those pohutukawas—their polysyllabic Maori name is used more generally than their European name, in spite of its association with the most joyous season in Christendom—in glens that run up from the coast. He has no doubt that a pohutukawa behind Omopu Bay is rightly regarded as the largest of its species. Its girth is not less than thirty feet.

Particularly handsome tuis were seen at Opo Bay. The island has a large colony of pied shags. White-throated shags, fantails, wood-pigeons, kakas, wild ducks, teal, kingfishers, morepork owls, gannets and ground larks were seen, and the shining cuckoo was heard. Pukekos, or swamphens, were present in a swamp forty years ago, but the party saw none, and an opinion is expressed that those brightplurnaged rails may have been exterminated on the island by wild pigs, which are plentiful. The Tasmanian quail, the songthrusli, the blackbird, the starling, the skylark, and, inevitably, the sparrow, are among introduced birds that find Karewa a pleasant abode. Flying above a school of kabawai, near the Karoa Reef, southeast of Mayor Island, one . evening, the visitors saw several hundred of Forster's/ Bailor's and flesh-footed shearwaters. The crater-ring of the old volcano from which Mayor Island was formed is remarkably well preserved.

Mr. T. McGill, Leslie Hills Station, North Canterbury, a bird-observer of many years' standing, expresses a decided opinion that the laughing owl does laugh and that Mr. C. Parr, of Lawrence, is mistaken in attributing mysterious nocturnal laughter to petrels alone. Mr. Mcc:ill's first experience of the laughing owl was about thirty years ago in Milton, Otago. Hearing some fowls making a noise one night, he went, out to discover the cause of their alarm. As he was entering the fowlhouse he heard an unusual laugh and an owl flew silently over his head. 11c had a good view of it as it flew toward a plantation. Some years later, 011 the old Coomb Hay Station, when he was trout fishing at night with his brother-in-law, an owl flew close, uttering the laughing notes. He believes with Mr. W. W. Smith, of New Plymouth, and with the late Mr. T. H. Potts, Governor's Bay, that there can be no doubt about the laughing character of the laughing owl's notes. He has heard petrels laughing at night as they flew along the Ninety Mile Beach, Canterbury, and at Oka tore, and he states that, their laugh is different from the laughing owl's laugh. Last year in Marlborough he examined an owl's nest in an overhanging rock, and men on North Canterbury stations told him that they recently saw owls, but these may have been the little German owls introduced into Canterbury and Otago about fifteen years ago. They are grey and small, "smaller than the native morepork, which, usually, is a bird of the forest.

A miner who spent, a large part of his life in the Waihi district before he took up his residence in Auckland has written describing an old raised beach near the present Waihi Beach, a stretch of sand east of Waihi town. This raised beach, he states, is about ten feet high. It is one of a series of raised beaches there. One of the others is about twenty-five feet above the high water mark, and another is fifty feet above at its highest part. There is another series at Orokawa. Bay, north of Waihi Beach, and south there is a coastal terrace, whose surface is more than fifty feet above sea level. Mr. P. C. Morgan, Director of Geological Survey, has examined much higher sea benches, cut in rocks laid down in Late Tertiary and Pleistocene times, which were recent geologically, although their distance in time from these days may be measured in millenniums, instead of years. At Homunga Bay, away north, but still in the Waihi district, Mr. Morgan saw wavecut benches 160 ft. and 340 ft., and even 550 ft. high. The highest of these is well above the present level of all parts of the Waihi Plain. This is explained by Mr. Morgan by the theory that, after the highest bench was formed, the surface of the plain was reduced by erosion to its present level, while the bench was not affected.

While dealing with the Hauraki district, it is interesting to note that the Coromandel Peninsula has been the scene of repeated volcanic eruptions on a grand scale. The peninsula is described as a pile of volcanic rocks, built on a base of ancient sedimentary rocks, now exposed only in the northern part of the goldfield. Those rocks were fractured at different times, Mr. Morgan explains, and the region was tilted to the south-east. Fossil ferns have been found" in clays on the south-west side of the Waihi Plain. It is believed that a fossil punga tree-fern was found in a cavity in the Silverton lode, 350 ft. below its outcrop, and pieces of wood converted' into rhyolite have been found in the. Grand Junction Company's "No. 1 shaft, and in the .Waihi Coras&py'&, No. 4 shaft.