CHAPTER IV.
NESTING.
But o’er my isles the forest drew
A mantle thick—save where a peak
Shows his grim teeth a-snarl and through
The filtered coolness creek and creek,
Tangled in ferns, in whispers speak.
And there the placid great lakes are,
And brimming rivers proudly force
Their ice-cold tides. Here, like a scar,
Dry-lipped, a withered watercourse
Crawls from a long-forgotten source.
Though the Kea has become, during the last forty years, the most notorious of all our New Zealand fauna, yet so cunning was the bird, and so secluded was its retreat, that it is only during the last few years that we have pierced the uncertainty that hung around its home life, and have been allowed to gaze with curious eye upon its nest.
The information concerning its home life that has come to hand in recent years is quite in keeping with the notoriety of the bird, and it can be safely said that its breeding habits are the most striking and interesting of those of our avifauna.
Were the Kea surrounded by countless enemies it could not have chosen a more impregnable fortress in which to rear its young; it is a veritable Gibraltar, and as such it usually remains unmolested.
Not only is the country in which the Kea lives dangerous as well as difficult to travel over, but it is in some of the least inaccessible places in that almost inaccessible country, high up in the mighty peaks, that the Kea makes its home.
I cannot improve upon the graphic description of the Kea’s home given by Mr. T. H. Potts. “It breeds in the
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