NEW ZEALAND BIRDS.

Southland Times, Issue 1113, 24 February 1869, Page 3

NEW ZEALAND BIRDS.

It is not to he donbted that the extermination of the gigantic birds of New Zealand was chiefly accomplished by the hand of man. In briefly retracing the past to the times when New Zealand was not yet trodden by the foot of man, we must assume that at that time the large dinornis and apteryx species, whose bones we find to-day, lived in great numbers upon open fern land, subsistiug on the roots of Pteris esculenta. Dr. J. Haast notices also the occurrence of bones of the dinornis in the moraines of the glaciers of the South Island, and observes that the present alpine flora furnished a large quantity of nutritious food quite capable of sustaining the life even of so large a creature ; and as the fruits of these plants seem at present to serve no evident purpose in the economy of nature, he argued the former existence of an adequate amount of animal life, to prevent an excessive development of vegetation. This part was played by the dinornis. Those huge birds were then the only large animal beings that populated New Zealand ; for of indigenous mammalia, except a little rat, there is nothing known. The first immigrants who throughout the whole length and breadth of the extensive forests found nothing for man to subsist on, except the native rat and some small birds, obtained from the giant birds the necessary sup plies of meat, enabling them to increase in coarse of time to a whole nation, numbering hundreds of thousand. But for those colossal birds it would be utterly impossible to comprehed how 200,000 or 300,000 human beings could have lived in New Zealand, a country which even in its vegetable world offered nothing for subsistence except fern roots. That such was really the case is sufficiently proved in the traditions of the natives. Ngahue, one of the discoverers of New Zealand— bo tradition says — describes the land as the haunt of coloeual birds, There are

yet some Maori poems extant, in which the father gives his son instructious how to behave in the contests with the moas, how to hunt and kill them. Mr Cormack as well as Mr Mantell have found the bones on both the North and South Islands in great numbers in the vicinity of casnping-grounds and fireplaces of the natives. Mounds were found full of such bones, in which after great feasts the remnants of the meal were promiscuously interred. The flesh and eggs were eaten ; the feathers were employed as ornaments for the hair; the skulls were used for holding tatooing powder ; the bones were converted into fish-hooks ; and the colossal eggs were huried with the dead, as provision during their long last journey to the lower regions. Consequently those huge birds were in former times the principal game of the natives, and were probably altogether exterminated in the course of a few centuries. They succumbed — the larger the species the sooner —to the same fate that is gradually sweeping the kiwi, the kakapo, and the rat kiore in a similar manner, and before our eyes, from the face of the land. — ' Hochstetter's New Zealand.'