THE WHITE KIWI.

Forest and Bird, Issue 49, 1 August 1938, Page 4

THE WHITE KIWI.

(By James Cowan)

That rare bird, a white kiwi, is not quite so strange or scarce a bird as most people imagine. A newspaper paragraph which went the rounds recently, one paper after another copying it, stated that evidence that a white kiwi “probably lived within the last twenty years’’ was disclosed in the existence of a valuable garment in the possession of a Rotorua woman; it has white kiwi feathers woven into it. This was regarded as very wonderful and rare. However, not only are such white birds well known to the Maori and referred to in legends, but their existence in quite recent times is within the knowledge of some of us. There is one on the Little Barrier Island native bird sanctuary, or was within the last five years or so. A former custodian of the island, the late Mr. Nelson, reported that he has seen it several times. On one occasion he “got a good look at it by the light of the full moon.” It is an albino bird caught in the Taupo country and taken to the island. Maori folk lore of the TongariroTaupo region invests white birds, whether tui or pigeon or kiwi, with an aura of sanctity, infringement of which has brought dread penalties “Should a man kill a white bird in the bush in these parts,” an old man of Ngati-Tuwharetoa said to me, “he would be punished by the spirits of the forest and the mountain. Te Ririo, the demon god, would come for him at night and carry him off into the wild lands, and if he survived to reach his home and people again he. would be demented, speaking a strange tongue.” The lone albino of Hauturu bird sanctuary appeared to have struck friendly acquaintance with the brown kiwis of the island. At any rate, one day, Mr. Nelson, when travelling up a gully, saw a young vari-coloured kiwi; its head feathers were white, its back and breast brown, its legs light yellow, and the hinder parts white. “It looked pretty,” he wrote in his report. In the following year he reported that the albino putative parent of this feathered piebald Spanish “pinto” would sound betterwas still alive and very healthy. On the West Coast of the South Island a white kiwi has more than once been caught. In the Taranaki bush, too, the “kiwi-tea” is known.