WHITE ISLAND.

Forest and Bird, Issue 13, 1 September 1927, Page 4

WHITE ISLAND.

A visit was recently made to White Island by a party wishing to spend a couple of days there with the object of observing the bird life, and it was very pleasing to note that the manager of the company, now operating the sulphur deposits, has not allowed the birds to be interfered with or molested in any way at all. The gannets nesting in the vicinity of the huts are totally indifferent to the presence of the men, as they pass by on the regular tracks that skirt the rookeries. There is a small wire netting enclosure round the hut known as the guest hut, and the fence cuts off a corner of the original nesting ground, but the gannets continue to occupy the ground right up to the line of the fence, and at first sight look like a flock of poultry crowded together in a pen. Shafts have been sunk in various places to test the depth of the deposits, and these would have been veritable death traps for the birds, but they have been protected with a covering of pohutukawa branches, and for the present at any rate the danger is thus obviated. A rare visitor, a Sclater penguin, arrived on the shore of Crater Bay while we were on the island. The bird was much exhausted and in a battered condition when it struggled ashore, but by the following morning it had recovered to some extent, and when we last saw it, standing on a big boulder, though still looking rather forlorn, it was very different from the bruised and bedraggled object of the day before.

At Rurima Rocks it was noticed that the shag rookery had suffered to some extent through one of the large pohutukawas being uprooted in a gale. Many old-established nests were brought to earth with it. The waters in the vicinity of the rookery have been long famous for their plenitude of fish, and there appears to be no depletion in their numbers despite the extraordinary rapacity of the cormorants that have lived and bred in the vicinity for generations following generations for ages past; a fact which goes to uphold the contention of noted ornithologists and others that on the whole the operations of these birds are beneficial rather than harmful to fish culture, in that they mostly destroy the class of fish which feed on fish ova and fry. Indeed, the operations of such birds in relation to fish supply must be merely a drop in the ocean in comparison to the ■quantity of eatable fish which the sea-monsters (swordfish, etc.) ■of the locality must daily consume.