IN TOUCH WITH NATURE

Otago Witness, Issue 3972, 29 April 1930, Page 9

IN TOUCH WITH NATURE

VULTURE OF THE SEA.

By J. Drummond, F.L.S.. F.Z.S. The only bird that meets the description of a visitor to Mr E. M. Guest’s residence on the Chatham Islands is the Nelly. “In a creek that runs past my house,” Mr Guest writes, “ there appeared a bird with the tubes on its bill much more pronounced than the albatrosses or the mollymawks. It was almost as big as a '"goose. It had a ferocious aspect, and was really fierce. It had been injured. When I first saw it, it was the sport of a crowd of children. I gave it shelter, and drove the children away. After resting amongst sedges for a few

<las's it disappeared. A gallant bird, its eyes fierce and frosty-looking, it screamed with rage at its molesters, who handled it with long sticks. A Maori boy of some size succeeded in grasping it by'the legs, but quickly let go. Inquiries showed that a Maori man had found it on the beach some miles away, and had taken it to Owenga in a sack, placing it in the creek. He, or somebody else, may have wounded it with shot —but I do not think so—and was too scared by its fierceness to handle it.

The captive’s nostrils, developed into tubes, place it amongst the Tubinares, a distinct and important order of the sea birds, including all the petrels, small and great, and the mollymawks and albatrosses. Some families in the order have the tubes long and elevated, as in the

case of the little storm petrels, hardly larger than blackbirds, which sailors call Moth ;r Carey's chickens. In others, as in the shear-waters and the mutton birds, the tubes are low and are directed forwards and slightly upwards. The black petrel, as black as ink almost, which favours no other seas than New Zealand's, unites the tubes into a single opening. The grey-faced petrel, which nests in holes in the ground on islands in Hauraki Gujf and the Bay of Plenty, the white-headed petrel of the Antipodes Islands, a wild and solitary bird, the nocturnal black-capped petrel of the Kermadec Islands, the rainbird, which nests in holes near the tops of mountain ranges far inland, in both the North Island and the South Island, and is heard calling at night as it flies to the sea, Cook’s petrel, and the Chatham Islands petrel, have the tubes directed slightly upwards.

The whale-birds have short tubes. The diving petrels unite their tubes on the top of the bill, with the openings upwards. The albatrosses and the mollymawks have disjointed tubes, running along the sides of the bill. The Nelly has the longest and stoutest tubes of all. The tubes, roughly, help to classify the groups of the Tubinares, but nobody seems to have offered an explanation, on utilitarian or other grounds, for the differences in the structure of the tubes, or even for the presence of this extraordinary development of the nostrils, found in this order of birds alone.

The Nelly nests in the cliffs of islands far south of New Zealand. It roams the Southern Ocean. Some people call it the vulture of the seas, on account of its disgusting habits. It has been seen gorg-