NATURE—AND MAN

Southland Times, Issue 25385, 12 September 1935, Page 12

NATURE—AND MAN

CUNNING OF BIRDS.

SOME REMARKABLE FEATS. (Edited by Leo Fanning.) Everybody known of the cleverness of birds in various activities attributed to mysterious “instinct,” which baffles scientists, although they offer learned explanations. “Evidence seems to be piled up that the flicker (a bird of U.S.A.) is the original telegrapher,” remarks a contributor to “Nature Magazine.” “Several times in the early morning,” the writer states, “I have been awakened by a sharp tapping on metal. One morning I located the sound as coming from the house across the street. Watching for a while I saw a flicker sitting on the apex of the roof calling loudly for several minutes. Then he ran down to the eaves trough and hammered it several times, stopping for a few seconds to listen before each attack upon the metal trough. Then he ran back to the top of the roof and called again. He repeated these actions until finally another flicker joined him on the roof and the two of them flew away. This took place several mornings.” An English reviewer mentions that the destructive German owl uses some of its victims as carrion bait for insect life. “The dead birds,’ he says, “will be placed by a stream or a bank or in a crevice, and the little owl returns again and again to feed off the insects which have been attracted by the decomposing bodies of its victims. One of the British Field Sport Society’s local secretaries makes an illuminating report on the killing of 16 pheasant chicks in a coop by little owls. The owls removed the dead chicks one by one to the banks of a stream a few hundred yards away from the pheasant farm. Here the dead chicks and the bodies of many small birds of other varieties were spread out at intervals of a few yards. Three or four times a day the owls were seen to go down to the line of traps to eat the burying beetles which came to bury the unfortunate little birds which the owls had killed.” Thoroughly alarmed by this alien pest’s slaughter of game and various kinds of small native birds, the North Canterbury Acclimatization Society has decided to offer a royalty of a shilling a head for the extermination of the nuisance. The society is appealing to kindred bodies in other districts to follow its example. A Guilefull Dotterel. In the Southland Times Mr Jules Tapper told a story of a banded dotterel which was not satisfied with its usual pretence of a broken wing or other injury in luring him away from its nest, from which he had flushed it in a spot by the upper reaches of the Waiau river. “The dotterel’s box of tricks,’ he remarks, “was of the usual antics of this species, pretending to have a broken leg or wing and falling over as if it could not proceed another yard. Finally I saw the bird drop alongside a stunted white tussock and remained there until I was within a yard or so of her. Judge my surprise to find that her stoppage had been at a ground lark’s nest containing eggs. As the fishing had proved good I again visited the river next day. I again passed the dotterel’s nesting place—the bird going through the identical performance, again stooping and leading me along to the lark’s nest. The dotterel’s deliberate intention was without doubt to take me away from her nest to that of the lark. It was the cutest and most cunning act

ever I have heard of by one of the feathered tribe.” Of course, a cynic may say that it was only by a coincidence that the dotterel stopped the second time at the pipit’s nest. Why should the dotterel know that the pipit had a nest there, I and so lead the intruder to it, on the | assumption that he would be content I with a pipit’s egg instead of a dotterel’s? I However, it is a good story and is ■ worth believing. The Lovable Pukeko. ‘ That friendly lovable bird, the much persecuted pukeko (known as the (swamp-hen), has many sturdy cham- ! pions, including two well-known writ- : ers, H. Guthrie-Smith and Charles I Nordhoff, who now lives in U.S.A. ( Here is a pleasant passage of a letter I from Mr Nordhoff in the New Zealand Fishing and Shooting Gazette: —"Two ( pairs of pukeko now live a wild life in | a nearby swamp, but one pair did me I the honour to stop with us, and are the ! joy of my life; the handsomest, most ! interesting and most comical birds I I have ever kept, full of character and I sense of humour. I suppose you know j all about their quaint habits and cries, and that they roost in trees precisely as fowls do. It is hard for me to believe the stories of their being a pest;, mine I are surrounded by nesting hens in the ' shrubbery, but never touch an egg. If I bird lovers all over the world knew the | pukeko, it would pay to start a farm for rearing them in New Zealand.” Not many of New Zealand’s poets have expended praise on the cabbage tree (writes James Cowan). They have found more inspiring subjects in the fem-trees, the pohutukawa, the I rata and the kauri. Alfred Domett is one of the very few who described the tui in verse; he found time to admire it in “Ranolf and Amohia:” . . . . That strange asphodel On tufts of green bayonet-blades Great bunches of white bloom upbore. Like blocks of sea-washed madrepore. That steeped the noon in fragrance wide. Till by the exceeding sweet opprest The stately- tree-fern leaned aside 1 For languor. . . . To the Maori the 'tui is quick with poetic and legendary suggestion; it is twined about with song and story as thickly as you see some of these venerable cabbage-trees in parks and gardens grown around with pakeha ivies.