THE KEA ON TRIAL.

Taranaki Daily News, 6 January 1920, Page 6

THE KEA ON TRIAL.

ITS FONDNESS FOE MUTTON. A CUHIOUS CHANGE IN HABIT. The sheepowners in New Zealand are suffering, and suffering very grievously, in consequence of, perhaps, the most curious tour de force that Mother Nature ever has played on her helpless children, writes Horace Hutchinson in the Westminster Gazette. The kea, a native species of parrot, has become very much too fond of mutton. That, briefly stated, is the whole of the trouble. It is not altogether a new story. For a good many years now we have heard lurid tales of the sheep-devouring propensities of these unnatural birds, but it appears that recently, perhaps in part by virtue of an added vigour acquired through the taste of blood, they have increased and multiplied, and have grown more and more persistent in their attack's, until at last a cry of something very like despair is going up from flock-owners in the neighborhood of these mountains in whose gorges the parrots breed. "We shall all be ruined if something is not done," is the voice of their common lamentation; but of all who swell this chorus there does not seem to be one able even to suggest what this "something" should be. The whole affair would be quite incredible ii we did not know it, by overwhelming testimony, to be true. Here was a bird, a harmless, bright-hued fruit eater! It had lived and flourished in the land for who will say how long? Certainly, it was an old inhabitant when the first recorded white man set his foot there. In those days, of course, there was no mutton in the land. It was the home of tiie marsupials (sic), the forerunners of the later mammalian development. We have no evidence that the kea over indulged in a marsupial dinner. On the contrary, all the witness goes to show that it was not until the sheep had been imported for many years, and were well established, that the parrots forsook their vegetarianism. On first statement it, may seem scarcely possible that a bird of the size and kind of a parrot should be the death of a creature so many times larger than itself as a full-grown sheep. Yet that is ust what happens. The parrots fall upon the sheep and slay them. After all, it is, not difficult to understand how it can be. The mode of the bird's attack is this, as it has been described to me. It flies down on the sheep's back, takes a firm hold on the wool with its claws, and begins immediate operations—with a scientific accuracy and directness that is probably beginning to be an instinct acquired during the several generations that its kin have been sheep-slayers— just there where the most vita! organs are nearest the surface and have least protection. "The kea is a born surgeon," said one scientist, speaking of the -skill of its operations. "The kea goes shrieking like a d——d thing, and a d d thing it is," was the comment on it, from another point of view, of a New Zealander, a sheep-owner, and not a scientist. And this, or the like, you might very well suppose to be the subconscious comment of the unfortunate sheep, assailed by this screaming thing from the sky becoming all iron claws and rending beak as soon a3 it has taken firm seat upon the wool. There ensues a scene to which we have to go back to classic tragedy for parallel—Orestes harnessed by the Furies, the Titan with the vulture rending at his liver—horrible to contemplate! We may imagine the piteous state of the wretched sheep vainly trying to dislodge the terrific rider. The demons come in flocks, shrieking. Thev do their deeds of death, eat their meals of quivering hot flesh; then off they go shrieking to their mountains. It is said Ui. „ their nesting places have been located in these fastnesses, /file few that can be killed by shooting make no impression worth counting on their total. They increase not only in number, but also in boldness and in the badness of their ferocity and appetite for flesh, and, further, in the distance, from their native mountains, to which they will travel down to prey on the sheep. One hardly likes to think what the end of it is to be. We find, or we suggest, a limit, in that blessed word, "aeroplane." It is just conceivable that by means of aeroplanes the nurseries of these demons may be discovered, no matter behind what inaccessible mountain walls they be guarded, and that chemistry, in the form of poison gas, and mechanics, joining hands, may find means to destroy the accursed brood ? It is an urgent matter, and it is a matter on which it would be very bad economy not to spend money with all reasonable liberality, if there bo any reasonable hope of abating a pest so deadly. All this is from the practical, the utilitarian point of view, and, so viewed, the case is almost desperately bad. Take another point, however, the scientific, and it is full of strange interest. It is just a reversal of the case which the sheep-own-ers of the Antipodes have made familiar to us. They point to us the grass famine created by the rabbits, which were brought in from Europe, and which have increased so enormously as to devour very much of the herbage, which we should have wished to keep as the heritage of she sheep. They preach the moral of the risks we run when we interfere with the equilibrium of warring forces which Nature, left alone, establishes. A like moral is preached at us by the Americans, for the depredations, and the hunting-out of native birds done by what they call (rightly enough) the "English" sparrow. Perhaps they forget, however, that they themselves imported the birds in the first instance, on tile occasion of a great caterpillar plague, which was stripping bare all the trees in Madison Park The sparrows faithfully did that which was expected of them. They ate the caterpillars; they stayed the plague. But they did just a little more than was expected; they remained and multiplied after doing that for which the original invitation had been given them, and, spreading widely over the Continent, have settled themselves in as a worse pest than that which they extirpated. So, "you never know, you know," what will happen when you introduce a new species into the happy, family in traditional possession of an island or a continent. The result generally goes farther than you have foreseen. But in all the more familiar instances, it is the case,of the imported animal injuring some other beast or bird already established. The muttoneating parrot's case is just opposite to ill is; That bird was in the island long before the slice]) came, and led, so far as v.e know, a perfectly innocent life. Then temptation entered, with the woolly mammal, and the bird has changed, lias become depraved, into a very devil. Can we not imagine some grinning malevolent demon surveying with evil glance the first parrot that was incited thu» to de-

part from the back and drive down into, the flesh with its cutting beak? In pure spirit of mischief, and of enjoyment of the wretched victim's torment, we may suppose that the first few incisions would be made. Then the bird, of perverted appetite, finding the taste of blood very good, would quickly form the habit of searching for it. All the more intelligent animals, birds and mammals alike, are imitative. One would follow another's lead; especially would the young piously follow the parental examples. Thus is habit formed —the habit of a large number —and in course of generations habit is inherited, and becomes instinct; sheepslaying becomes a new part of the tribal tradition, just as surely as fruit-eating, and entire absence from the flesh of any of the higher creatures was the tradition a few generations back. After all, there is something in the aspect of the parrot—hook beaked and strongly taloned—not so far remote from that of the true birds of prey. It has its aquiline features. That is said, not by way of suggestion that the predacious habit is a "throw back" to the evil practices of an ancestor common to the parrots and the hawks. A common father of the evil that is in every one of us, we may, no doubt, dig out if only we delve deep enough into the past. But the kea must bear the blame of its own sins, and it is long subsequent to the date at which it became a kea that it developed this criminal love of mutton.