PLEA FOR THE KEA

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23115, 13 August 1938, Page 20

PLEA FOR THE KEA

WISDOM QUESTIONED HABIT OF ATTACKING SHEEP REPLY TO BIRD SOCIETY [by telegraph —own correspondent] DUNEDIN, Friday " "While holding the New Zealand Forest and Bird Protection Society in the highest respect and maintaining the utmost sympathy for its general views, many peopje," says the Evening Star in an editorial, "will feel inclined to join issue with two speakers at its recent executive meeting who carried a brief for the kea. "J n asking why taxpayers should be ordered to pay £.'352 during the current year by way of bonus for the killing of kens, Mrs. Knox Gilmer described the kea as one of the most remarkable parrots in the world, and expressed the belief that it deserved protection, not persecution. ' The playful, lovable birds,' she said, ' are a great attraction for tourists at Mount Cook and at the Franz Josef Glacier.' It is easy enough to agree with Mrs. Gilmer that the kea is one of the most remarkable parrots in the world, although some of its claims to distinction cannot be termed prepossessing, " Originally a feeder on carrion, grubs, fruits and seeds, the kea, whose strongholds were primarily in the mountainous back-country districts of the South Island, have come to rely more and more—perhaps the bird itself cannot be blamed for this—upon the offal of slaughter houses, of sheep runs, and also on the fat of inverted sheepskins, thus acquiring a taste for flesh which led to its habit of attacking the sheep themselves. It has been irrefutably established by high-country station owners and their shepherds, who have seen pathetic results of its depredations, that the kea has a keen appetite for the sheep's kidney fat, gaining access to it by pecking its way through the flesh on. the back. " Then the question resolves itself down to this: are keas to be preserved in their free state as an attraction for tourists, or ax-e the primary producers, on whom, rather than overseas visitors, the Dominion depends for its basic prosperity at the present time, to be afforded protection?"