NATURE—AND MAN

Southland Times, Issue 22214, 5 January 1934, Page 9

NATURE—AND MAN

A SOULFUL BIRD LOVER. SOME PLEASANT OBSERVATIONS. (Edited by Leo Fanning). .... I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes , The still, sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power . To chasten and subdue. And I have felt A presence that “disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts: a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, .... And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, and all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still . A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains: and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world . , Of eye and ear, both what they half create, And what perceive; well pleased to recognize In nature and the language of the sense, The Anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse. The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being. When I read the preface of H. Guth-rie-Smith’s “Mutton Birds and Other Birds” I felt that he was as warm and as wise a lover of Nature as even Wordsworth was. I quoted some. passages which should have convinced readers that my impression was right. That very pleasant book gives the author’s observations of bird life in Stewart Island and outlying isles. “Oh these delightful islets of the south, their clean seas and wooded shores,” runs one passage. “We were free, beyond recall for days.. It was delightful to wake like a child eager for the day, to whom still the world is fresh and to whom each hour brings wonder and surprise, to chew the cud of yesterday’s discoveries, the morrow’s to anticipate. Then what good fellows were the fishing folk. All my life I have known gillies and gamekeepers to be the best of company, and now I found myself intimately connected with a class of man equally simple and with the same width of outside interests.

“There is no more inspiring prospect than the anticipation of new open-air experiences. I confess I longed to sleep in that whare over the pebble beach and to wake in the morning with ocean all around, perhaps happily for a few moments even to believe myself in very truth marooned, at the very least to feel the recollections thronging back of boys’ books with their lore of the seas, their bold buccaneers, and pirates bearded and bronzed. They may have had their weaknesses, these brave men; they could not have been wholly bad; for they lived under the wide skies and knew all weather signs, the play of the tides, the portents of the flights of birds. Their habits were quite unconventional; their crimes have delighted generations of boys, and were committed wholly in the open.” Marvellous Flights of Petrels.

Mr Guthrie-Smith had a camp on the isle of Herekopere (also known as Te Marama) about eight miles out from Halfmoon Bay. “We were fortunate,” he wrote, “in obtaining our first view of the petrel flight under circumstances favourable to eye and ear. The weather had improved, the skies were clear, and, except for the expectant break and the recurrent silence of each wave’s ebb, all was still. About seven the earliest of the kuaka began to arrive; at first here a bird and there a bird; then almost at once it began to hail kuaka, then to sleet kuaka, and lastly to snow kuaka. They reached the island in dozens, scores, hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, and I verily believe ’perhaps in millions. At first they hurtled themselves in like hailstones, then later fell with some degree of regard to their safety, and lastly lit softly as snow and with hardly a rustle.

“Although standing on a conspicuous spot on a rise in open ground and guarding my head and face I was struck by kuaka eight times in a few minutes. They were dropping thickly into the vines and nettles, the foliosa grass, the soft bare ground, and inland and a little behind me falling like ripe fruit through the branches of the scrub. They were thumping, too, on the whare roof. The kuaka never circles or hesitates, but always flies very fast and straight in from the sea, but the final drop is vertical or not a pane of glass in the whare windows could have remained intact.

“The difference in the sound of the fall of the early, late, and latest kuaka may perhaps be ascribed to the altering light; on the other hand it may be caused by the impetuosity of affection, the first being perhaps the mates of the single birds in lonely occupation of their holes; the next lot those arriving without intent to select at once; and the last detachment feeling in a lesser degree the influence of love and spring. This amazing influx of kuaka continued for about half an hour, although for long after that huge parties of stragglers continued intermittently to arrive. Each morning we might have gathered them as the Israelites gathered from the wilderness their quail, each morning the birdfall overnight had landed petrels in the kerosene tin used for carriage of water —on one occasion there were three birds in it. Every empty box flat on its base contained birds. They fell down the chimney, they floated in our water-cask.” Tuis and Bcllbirds. “The bell-bird has several points of resemblance to its near relative, the tui,” remarks Mr Guthrie-Smith. “It delights, as does the tui, to sing from some tree on a clearing’s edge and thence pour forth its music to the light and the wide sky. Again, like the tui, in spring time and when mating, pairs can be noticed flying swiftly together one above the other, separated only by a few inches. In these remarkable flights the upper bird manages to duplicate and follow exactly each slightest undulation, inclination, drop, or rise of the lower. To accomplish this at full speed and dashing through the branched heights and tangle of underwood, without the deviation of a hair’s breadth of the space between the pair, has always seemed to me to be one of the most extraordinary efforts of flight. “Lastly, the bell-bird, too, is an excellent mimic—a better imitator of other birds than even the tui. Perched on a tree above a swamp near Mason Bay I watched one giving a fine rendering of the mellow chirp of a fern bird; and on Ulva I have been again and again deceived by its imitation of a parrakeet’s quick chattering _ note—a note on its commencement a little like that of the common house sparrow.” “Many of the bell-birds’s notes and fragments must be extremely like those of the tui, for on Tutira where the bell-bird is extremely rare—l have seen but a single specimen in thirty years—l have noticed a friend who intimately knew both birds by sight, listening to the tui and quite confidently affirming the notes heard to be those of the bell-bird.”