NATIONAL MASCOT

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 54, Issue 3894, 26 April 1937, Page 6

NATIONAL MASCOT

BIRD FEW NEW ZEALANDERS HAVE EVER SEEN. MEETING NAPIER’S KIWI. “Why haven’t we seen a kiwi?” demand many visitors from overseas, when as their departure from New Zealand comes near they realise that they have never set eyes on that bird which has become famous abroad as the emblem of this Dominion. The same question is often put to keepers at the Wellington Zoo, and amazement is expressed when it transpires that the average New Zealander has himself never come face to face with even a tame kiwi. One of the very few kiwis living in captivity is to be seen at the Hawkes’ Bay Acclimatisation Society’s game farm at Meeanee, just outside Napier. A representative of “The Dominion” found the bird enjoying forty winks at the bottom of a large burrow or den in a large enclosure containing a number of pheasants. As the kiwi did not seem sociable, the caretaker’s wife, donning an immense glove like that of an American ball-game base-keeper, put her arm down the hole and turned him out. He promptly squatted down and dozed off again in the sunshine. A strange shapeless bird about the size of a hen, with what appeared to be hairs instead of feathers, neither wings nor tail, the short sturdy legs of an All Black forward, and an extraordinary growth of whiskers about the base of its long beak. That was the impression created by one’s first glimpse of New Zealand’s national bird. It was interesting rather than beautiful. The kiwi is essentially nocturnal. That is one of the reasons why it is so seldom seen. Kiwis are still common in the vast impenetrable forests of the Urewera Country, but they are seldom seen except by the servicecar drivers whose headlights dazzle them after dusk, and by other belated motorists upon lonely roads. They are numerous on such island sanctuaries as the Little Barrier, Kapiti, and Stewart Island, and in the dense bush of South Westland. Camp in the bush, and in the stillness of night one may hear them, uttering their weird call, and snuffling noisily in their eternal quest of worms.

Particularly keen scent and hearing are two of the kiwi’s most notable abilities. He can hear the undertone ticking of worms moving in the earth so clearly that he knows exactly where to insert his beak. He can smell the fat beetle larvae lying dormant in rotten logs. But these keen senses have often been his undoing. It was the Maori way to decoy him by calling, or by faint clicking of pieces of dry wood. They killed him for his skin, and even today many cloaks of rich red-brown kiwi feathers are to be seen preserved among the Urewera people.

Not only the ’Maori hunted the kiwi. In the ’seventies kiwi-feather muffs and boas and even coats came into vogue, and white kiwi-hunters with dog and torch decimated these quaint creatures. To-day, however, they are strictly protected, and only by special dispensation, in view of the fact that after long domesticity he would be unable to fend for himself in the wild, is the Napier kiwi retained in captivity.

It is often said that the kiwi is a miniature cousin of the moa, but that is not strictly so. Although the extinct moa was its closest known relation, the kiwi belongs to a type entirely separate from any other species of bird. And of its peculiarities none is more remarkable than the egg laid by the kiwi, for it is no less than a quarter the size of the adult bird. A grown kiwi weighs about 41b; its sin egg may weigh just on a pound. The egg is so large that the ancient Maori could not believe that the bird could balance on the top to hatch it, and conceived the theory that it buried it for half its length in the ground, so as to reduce its height to something approaching reasonable proportions.