SONG BIRDS.

Otago Witness, Issue 3853, 17 January 1928, Page 30

SONG BIRDS.

NATIVES OF NEW ZEALAND.

A very interesting and entertaining talk on the song birds of New Zealand was given to a large audience at the School of Music last week by Mr Johannes C. Andersen, librarian of the Turnbull Library, Welllington. Mr Andersen is on the staff of the Teachers’ Summer School. Introducing the speaker, the President (Mr F. Milner) referred to Mr Andersen’s prominent place in New Zealand literature. Besides being a poet of no mean merit, Mr Andersen was a student of and an authority on New Zealand writings (says the Nelson Mail). Mr Andersen has spent some of his free time in the bush listening to the songs of the birds, and he has recorded musically many hundreds of their songs. The address last night was made all the more interesting by the dozens of bird imitations which Mr Andersen gave. He has caught the notes perfectly, and reproduces them with his lips with the strictest fidelity. Mr Andersen said that what first led him to study New Zealand’s native birds was the realisation that many of them were fast dying out, and he thought that even if the birds must go yet some of their natural music might be recorded for all time. If they had been English birds then the task of writing their music would have been impossible for while the English birds preserved no method in their singing the New Zealand natives sang melodies or musical phrases arranged in an ordered sequence. The lecturer said that while you never heard the same song twice from a thrush he was quite sure some of the New Zealand birds would invent a song, and if it pleased them they would repeat it. Mr Anderson said that his favourite bird was the grey warbler, and from hearing two distinct varieties of song from that bird he had concluded that there were two While having an easily recognisable characteristic the grey warblers’ song differed in every part of New Zealand. The one general song was somewhat like the note of a violin. While singing the bird turned from left to right as if performing to an ifudience. If the birds had the same fancy for music as human beings, said Mr Andersen, then you would expect to find some of their phrases the same as those written by mankind. This was undoubtedly true. The lecturer gave several imitations of birds’ notes and isolated phrases which were at once recognisable as a portion of some well-known composition. Mr Andersen said that on one occasion he actually heard a bell-bird singing “ The Campbells are Coming.” The birds’ songs, he said, were built on the same scale as those written by man, and the birds evidently had the same sense of hearing that man had so far as music was concerned. Two outstanding performers were the tui and the bell-brd (sometimes called the mockingbird), two different species frequently confused by many people. The tui did the imitating and not the bell-bird, which, because of the sound of its Maori name, had been wrongly referred to as the mocking bird. The shining cuckoo was very interesting because of the mystery surrounding its supposed annual migration to New Guinea and the nearby islands. No one had, however, ever seen the cuckoo come or go, and there was no direct evidence of its ever having been seen in large numbers anywhere except in New Zealand. The speaker considered that it' was quite possible that the cuckoo did not migrate at all, but that it went into retirement for part of the year to-inaccessible parts of the bush country. The shining cuckoo chose the nest of the grey warble*- to rear its young, and, as the grey warbler built a pedant nest with the opening in the side or bottom and far too small for a cuckoo to enter, it- was puzzling how the pirate managed to lay its egg in the nest. One theory was that the cuckoo laid the egg on the ground and then carried it-to the nest, while others thought that the cuckoo tore open the nest, which the owner afterwards repaired. Eventually the young cuckoo ousted the warbler’s eggs or young, but this did not seem to prevent the warbler from having a liking for the cuckoo, and when the young bird left the nest much earlier than the young warblers would have done the forsaken fosterparents seemed very sad and sang a plaintive note. A somewhat similar bird to the grey warbler was the brown creeper, 'which was to be found only in the South Island. Unlike the grey warblers which went

about in pairs, the brown creepers were always in little flocks of from five to 25 birds. They illustrated very clearly that - the birds knew what thev were singing. They all sang together, and often changed the metre still all together. One peculiar trick of the brown creepers was that when they were running down the scale on a tremulo they all vibrated their tails. Mr Andersen told how he once attracted a flock of brown creepers by whistling in the bush. They all came quite dose to him and arranged themselves in a roup. “ I wouldn’t leave off whistling,” he said, “ and they wouldn’t leave off singing, but I had to leave off first. Apparently they just came along to stop that noise.” Theso little birds certainly had a repertoire, and the warblers varied their songs in the same way. Another outstanding feature of the New Zealand birds’ singing waa that they put expression into their songs. A comparison between the skylark and the tui was interesting. The skylark could sing remarkably few notes, only two or three, but the tui had a compass of over three octaves, including his beautiful whisper song two octaves about hia ordinary pitch and inaudible to many people. The tui if he liked could be an unparalelled singer, but he didn’t like Nevtreheless, one well-known bird lover had stated that in his opinion the tui was superior to the nightingale. Mr Andersen was not decided which He liked best, a thrush or a tui, until one one occasion he heard thepi together. “The thrush wasn’t in it.” Mr Andersen gave a very beautiful description of a Kapiti Island night just before dawn, and spoke of the tuis’ morning call, which frequently consisted of the birds singing as many as five different parts. When the tuis had sung for about 20 minutes then all the small birds joined in.

The Maoris possessed no ear for melody, and did not distinguish the native birds for their notes, but were attracted by those that appeared to say things. There was, for instance, the parakeet with his “be quick, be quick.” or, as the Maoris sometimes interpreted it when naming the parakeet the football bird, “ free kick, free kick.”

•The songs of both the tui and the bell bird, said Mr Anderson, contained harsh notes, but while the tui seemed to make the harsh noise merely to spoil good music, the bell-bird used it to divide his song into regular intervals similar to the bars in music.

After giving a series of examples of the bush humorists with special reference to the weka, Mr Andersen spoke of the sanctuaries for New Zealand birds. “From Kapiti,” he said, ‘a thousand tuis go over to the mainland each year for feeding purposes, and only a quarter of them go back again. Thus if sanctuaries were established on islands round the coast of New Zealand the unmolested birds would quickly repopulate the whole of the mainland.”