It is said that, in the early days, miners prospecting for gold often killed a sheep for food, and, roughly skinning it, would leave the skin and much offal on the ground, thus giving the Kea ample opportunity to get the taste for meat.
Once having acquired the carnivorous taste, it would soon find out that the dead sheep lying about the station contained the same kind of food, and that by tearing off the wool a good meal was always to be had. Tearing at the half-dead sheep, buried in the snow, would be its next step on the downward course; and, finding a lack of dead sheep it would soon begin to attempt to eat the animal while it was running about. The wounds thus caused would soon mortify and cause the animal’s death, and so the Kea would find an ever accessible method of acquiring a meal.
Some early writers suggest that, as the bird formerly fed on insect larvae, the finding of a dead sheep in an advanced stage of decomposition gave them the taste for meat. In this way, the carcases being often full of maggots from the eggs of the ever-present blow-fly, as the Kea picked out the maggots it would at the same time eat pieces of meat and so acquire the taste for flesh.
This may in some measure have influenced the bird; at any rate, it would largely account for some Keas being fond of bad meat.
The following information, forwarded by Mr. James McDonald, adds weight to the hunger theory, especially as the killing first began on the station of which he speaks.
In a letter to me he says:—“I would like to say one thing in answer to the question why the Wanaka Station suffered first by the Kea. My opinion is that it was because this station was the first to send men out to the out-huts in winter where they had to kill their own mutton. The skin was hung up on a fence or a bush, and the birds, driven to lower levels by the heavy snow which covered everything, came down in numbers to pick at the skins and entrails. When deprived of this they began to kill sheep for themselves,
