120 Bird - Lore
blue. singing, the while. a clear gurgling medley of continued song. as though nothing could exhaust its vitality. The Skylark has been introduced into many parts of New Zealand and seems to prosper in the new land,
The little New Zealand Kingfisher was a common bird in the Master- ton district. It is much smaller than the Belted Kingfisher of North America, and is dressed in a bluergreen coat, a buff)" brown vest and a white collar. Although fond of the vicinity of streams. it frequently strays to a considerable distance from any water. where it no doubt finds enough insect food to take the place of a fish diet.
Many New Zealand birds of which the traveler reads and which he fondly expects to encounter during his wanderings, are so rare or locally distributed that it is well nigh impossible to have a glimpse of them alive. For example, there is the Blue-wattled Crow of North Island, and its near relation. the Orange-wattled Crow of South Island, which must be sought in certain restricted districts. So also with the Huia, a bird even more limited in range, being found chiefly in the mountains north of Wellington. It is one of the peculiarly interesting birds of the region. and is highly prized bV the ll/Iaoris. who wear its tail feathers as emblems of Chieftain- ship. The most extraordinary thing about the Huia is the great difierence between the bill of the male and the female. The former has a comparatively short, stout beak, while that of the latter is abnormally elongated, slender and sickle-shaped It is said that the male pecks the bark, into which his inseparable companion then thrusts her beak to extracr the grub. It is with pain one learns that she does not. like a good and dutiful wife, divide the niorsel thus jointly secured. but swallows it entire and leaves her lord and master to forage further. The Huia is a Starling, about a foot and a half long. glossy black in color, with a broad band of White on the tip of the tail, The face is ornamented with large rounded Wattles of a brilliant orange color, and the bill is light ivory in tone,
Two other members of the Starling family which still occur in restricted areas of New Zealand. are the Saddle-back. so named from the rusty patch on the back of its black body. and the Jack Bird. which is colored a dark brown, edged in places with rufous. The former is found on the Barrier Islands off the Auckland coast, in the mountains back of Wellington, and in a few districts of South Island; the latter is confined to the lonely for— ests of the West Coast Sounds district of South Island. They are de- scribed as noisy. eccentric birds.
Two species of Cuckoos nest in New Zealand and migrate in opposite directions for the winter. The Long-tailed Cuckoo. which is colored strikingly like the Cooper‘s hawk of America, spends its leisure months of travel in the South Sea Islands, while the gaudy little shining Cuckoo, with its golden-green, iridescent hack and its white. green-barred breast, journeys over the waste of sea to Australia, Both species seem to have
