TOO LITTLE EXERCISE, TOO MUCH FOOD

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 12, Issue 78, 6 August 1948, Page 8

TOO LITTLE EXERCISE, TOO MUCH FOOD

Joey the kea is dead. “The birds will miss him,” said his keeper, a member of the No. 2 gardens staff at Invercargill. “Joey was a great favourite with the children. He used to watch them out of his beady eyes and they would throw tit-bits to him.” But that was Joey’s downfall—too little exercise and too much food. Last week he was found in his enclosure, dead as mutton, with his feet turned up. For 12 years he had been one of the attractions to the gardens, and people who had only read of keas and the things they did to sheep used to stop and say, “So that’s a kea! Why, it looks just like a parrot.” After shedding a “silent tear over his lost pal, the keeper sent his mortal remains down to the plant propagating department in Queen’s Park, for the officer in charge there is a keen fly fisherman. To him Joey is more useful dead than alive, and after all Joey himself'may have the consolation of knowing in that better land that here on earth he is still serving a useful purpose in catching fish for a plant propagator’s breakfast.