THE MOA’S MEDICINE.
Among the exhibits at the Dominion Museum relating to New Zealand’s giant wingless bird, the moa, are two small boxes of polished pebbles, uninteresting enough at first glance until one reads the explanatory card behind them. This informs that stones were swallowed by the moa, as by other birds, to assist the treatment of the vegetable food on which they lived. In peat swamps the contents of the gizzard with these stones intermixed are sometimes found preserved when all the bones of the birds have perished. - eaps of worn pebbles are also found on the surface in many places, marking the spot where the bird died, and the bones have completely disappeared. It was while in the Gisborne district that a reporter was given a grey pebble of quartz, the surface glassy with friction, and told' that such small stones were ofteh picked up on the farm, hnd that they once aided the process of digestion in a bird.
Permanent link to this item
Hononga pūmau ki tēnei tūemi
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/HOG19291024.2.72.3
Bibliographic details
Ngā taipitopito pukapuka
Hokitika Guardian, 24 October 1929, Page 8
Word count
Tapeke kupu
162THE MOA’S MEDICINE. Hokitika Guardian, 24 October 1929, Page 8
Using this item
Te whakamahi i tēnei tūemi
The Greymouth Evening Star Co Ltd is the copyright owner for the Hokitika Guardian. You can reproduce in-copyright material from this newspaper for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). This newspaper is not available for commercial use without the consent of the Greymouth Evening Star Co Ltd. For advice on reproduction of out-of-copyright material from this newspaper, please refer to the Copyright guide.
Log in