Rats and Blackbirds

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 817, 25 March 1955, Page 22

Rats and Blackbirds

by

SUNDOWNER

FEBRUARY 25

DON’T know whether it is the Transport Department or the owners of garages who are decorating the highways with warnings about the dangers of faulty brakes. Nor do I know who needs, and heeds, these warnings. The driver who starts knowing that he can’t stop should not go to a service station but to a mental hospital. But I saw a

car the other day plough into a mob of sheep outside a

mental hospital gate. As far as I could judge not many sheep were injured; but the driver of the sheep was in a car too. I drove on wondering which driver should enter the hospital first. It is one thing to follow sheep in a car on a country road where the dogs don’t lose their heads and delays cause no traffic jams. To follow them in a car through a busy street breaks every rule of courtesy and common sense. But when that driver calls on the psychiatrist I have a suspicion that I ought to go with him. Calendars are not quite as dangerous as cars, but they can be just as difficult to stop. One entry

demands another; one>creature calls to another; one comment provokes another, till all the restraints of discretion and indolence are as useless as hydraulic brakes without fluid. I should have/read the safety warnings more carefully and refused to start what I had no certainty I could stop.

FEBRUARY 26

HAT makes a cat catch a rat? It is a hungry cat that wiil eat a rat, a reckless cat that will play with one. Ours is a cautious cat, and very rarely hungry, but when I went out this. morning she was lying beside a buck rat that

looked formidable even when it was dead. Where she

found it I don’t know, since I have not seen or heard or come on the marks of a live rat for several years. It was black, too, or almost black, with long and coarse hair-what we used to call a bush rat in the North Island. But there is no bush within miles of this valley. The last recently killed rat I can remember seeing was almost dropped on

my head by a hawk which, after struggling over a row of pine trees with something heavy in its claws, took fright when it saw me immediately below it and dropped its burden only a few feet from me. That rat was half eaten but brown, and I was not sure whether the hawk had killed it or picked up something left by a dog or a cat. When every farmer grew grain crops, and stacks of sheaves were left standing all winter, rats were almost as numerous as sheep. It was one of the excitements of threshing to surround a stack with sticks as the last of the sheaves went up into the mill and the only chance for the rats was to escape while there was still some cover. A few always did escape, since a rat keeps his head when he runs away and watches where the blows are falling. When we used flexible sticks his chances were not good, but we usually picked up whatever was handy and I can still remember the frustrated feeling when I aimed a blow with a fotk or a batten and the rat stopped just before I hit the ground. It surprises me that we ever kept them in check. But nowhere, as far as I know, have they been completely exterminated. If black rats are now rare-in most parts of the world, I think, except South America-that is not because man has killed them but because brown rats have stolen their food and their hiding places. In spite of the

food they eat, the property they destroy, and the diseases they circulate, rats have defied man for generations to add them to the ‘lists of. animals st will not allow to live. : ;

FEBRUARY 28

— i — A NORTHLAND correspondent wants to know "where our New Zealand blackbirds came from," why the cock bird never sings; and why its beak is harder and sharper than the beak of "remembered" blackbirds in England.

They are questions for an ornithologist and not for a shep-

herd, but it would be mock-modest to refuse on that account to answer. I suspect that the important word in my correspondent’s note is "remembered." Northland is a long way from England, and it may be-I do not know-that 1955 is a year or two past the day when the blackbirds of England were last seen. I find it difficult to believe that blackbirds could remain blackbirds in Europe for hundreds of years and turn into something else in New Zealand in 88 years. But it seems to be established that blackbirds were reluctant to settle in Northland when the way there was first opened to them, and that they are still a little reluctant to stay. Guthrie-Smith and G. M. Thomson, perhaps our highest

authorities on acclimatisation, have both drawn attention to the fact that blackbirds from the beginning "shied off the poor lands immediately north of Auckland" and took a long time to find the good lands beyond this hungry belt. Guthrie-Smith gives good reasons for his belief that blackbirds, after being released in Auckland in 1867, followed the East Coast all the way to Hawke’s Baya mere trickle of birds for 40 or 50 years, and then a steady stream. I don’t know when they turned north again, but it was after they had established themselves in the south, and had accepted New Zealand as their home. With regard to their singing, I would find it easier to believe that they have developed new songs in Northland than that they refuse to sing at all. Most birds are mimics to some extent, and it may easily be the case that Northland has put something into a blackbird’s song or taken something out. Gilbert White says somewhere that he heard a blackbird singing-not just chattering or call-ing-on the wing. That is something I have never heard in New Zealand, but it would surprise me less to hear it than to go through a season without hearing any song. at all. I don’t expect to hear blackbirds in February, but from July or August till January they are hardly ever silent. I have heard them in October deep in the bush. (To be continued)