amongst the trees heralded the arrival of the birds, a female and male huia, which finally settled on a nearby miro tree. I gazed with wonder and admiration, for the first time in my life, at the most beautiful forest bird of the feathered kingdom. A feeling of pity and regret passed through me, that such lovely and handsome birds as the huias were to be slaughtered just for the sake of their tail feathers. By the end of the week the two elders had bagged six huias and decided to call the hunt off. We had our belongings—which included some wild pork to augment our meat larder at home—packed out to the Wai-o-rongo-mai station by the shepherd, the elders thanked Mr Matthews for his hospitality, and we made the long trek home to Pirinoa. Needless to say, the elders were well pleased with the result of the huia hunt.

General Description of the Huia Of all our forest birds, the huia may be considered outstanding in point of view of bodily colour alone, quite apart from the remarkable glossy-black tail feathers with their white tips, and there were generally 12 feathers to a huia's tail. The general bodily colour was dark blue merging to black, with an overall greenish sheen covering its body and head. One of the most beautiful features of the huia was the bright golden-orange wattles compressed beneath its lower jaw, these wattles being generally a little more than an inch across and of an ovalish shape. The different species were recognised by their beaks, the male's beak being straight and about three or more inches long, with the female's beak circular and about six inches long. The male used its beak, short, thick at the base but tapering to a sharp point, to open up the huhu grub holes in the half-rotten trees to make it easy for its female to fish out the huhu with her slender curving beak. The huhu and other grubs and insects, berries and fern roots were the main diet of the huias. The female was a larger bird than its companion, its measurement being about 20 to 22 inches in length, while the male was 18 to 19 inches long. In comparison, the huia would have been a shade smaller than the ordinary magpie. † † † As I have spoken to many of our younger Maori generation about the huia bird, I was rather shocked to learn that some of them had no knowledge of the huia, so I have decided to make known through ‘Te Ao Hou’, the record of the huia as I have seen it in its natural surroundings. Kia Ora, T. V. Saunders.

continued from page 27 made by the education committee which prepared the report, that ‘a change of administrative control and a change of name has not altered the fact that many Maori children have special needs requiring special provisions’. ‘The Board must be awake to recognizing where these special needs exist and must cope with them adequately. An active school committee which draws in Maori parents as members is an excellent safeguard by which Maori parents can ensure that the special needs of their children are in fact discovered and provided for. This reference extends beyond the recognized disability of the Maori child in English language and literature, to that broad, rather vague and controversial concept—Maoritanga. Here is a specific need, and an important one. The director of the English Language Institute at Victoria University of Wellington made these two encouraging observations: ‘The child whose mother tongue is not English is basically a privileged child … investment in these children is not a regrettable duty but a profitable venture.’ Critics of this point of view rely on the argument that the language is dying if not already dead, and it is but a matter of time when Maori custom and practice will also disappear. This argument of course is not true. Maori is the language of the marae, the church, the daily language of the people of the East Coast, Northland and the Urewera; and for any Maori with aspirations of a place of prominence among his people he must be conversant in Maori. If Maoritanga is to find its true place in the schools, it is surely the Maori community that must agitate to achieve this end, and places where such agitation pays off include, among others, the small, humble, and inconspicuous school committee.