Makes Solid Nest on Nigger-heads.

Star (Christchurch), Volume XLIV, Issue 197, 20 August 1931, Page 8

Makes Solid Nest on Nigger-heads.

Nature Notes.

By

James Drummond,

F.L.S.. F.Z.S.

'JMIE white-throated shag, plentiful in many parts of New Zealand, found nowhere else, knows how to build solidly. Its nest is made not of flimsy material, but of twigs and sticks, all closely interlaced and knitted with grass and leaves, having a slight depression for the eggs; a compact, substantial nest, well able to sustain the weight of a sitting bird, and of three very ugly young, as black as Negroes.

Several hundred white-throated shags had a nesting-place in a nigger-head swamp. The nests were close together on niggerheads that stood out of the water. The smell was intolerable. Low scrub that fringes the shores of lakes and lagoons is a more favourite site the nests. In the old, days, Maori hapus, or clans, had proprietary rights in the colonies of nests, exercising rights of ownership, visiting the colonies regularly, collecting the young shags, preserving them in fat. and regarding them as a delicacy. A European who accompanied a shag-party to the Tauranga River, Lake Taupo, watched the Maoris collect 400 young shags in one day. This shag frequents most of Canterbury’s back-country lakes, visits the lower Waimakariri and the Ashley, is plentiful on Lake Forsyth, but, strangely, rare on Lake Ellesmere.