INNOCENTS ABROAD

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 820, 15 April 1955, Page 16

INNOCENTS ABROAD

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SUNDOWNER

MARCH 19

WOULD like to know who first started the report that skylarks. are New Zealand's "second worst bird pest." To my knowledge it has gone twice round the world in magazines and newspapers, and I saw it again today in a scientific work written by the Superintendent of the London Zoological Gar- | dens. This means, of course, that the | life of this legend has now been | in-

definitely. prolonged. It will be copied, borrowed, repeated

year aiter year till interest in it dies. Then some bright lad will discover it again, and repeat it again, without so much as a suspicion that it is nonsense. So the whole ridiculous business will get a new lease of life with a far better "expectation" than.skylarks themselves now have. When I was a boy larks ‘sang all summer wherever men -were not too numerous. Even in winter they were equal to a song on a calm sunny day. They were still numerous in shy twenties, thirties and forties, but I envy the man who hears them often today. Their fondness for sprouting grain, with their habit of nesting in the ground, has made them easy game for angry and greedy hedgehogs, and will sooner or later, I am afraid, exterminate them altogether. We have had them for 90 years. I would like to be sure that we will havé them for a hundred years. I have seen one nest on our hill sinee I returned to it five years ago. That may mean what seeing one rat means20 to 200 not seen. But rats don’t sing. ah a ae Pa

MARCH 21

N Y young ram has redeemed himself. 1 : ‘ He treats the old rams respect, though one is too fat to worry him and the other too slow, but he is in full command of the eight ewes and the four bottle-fed wethers. Soon there will be enough grass to justify an increase in his harem. But it is my own fault that he has already become a fencer. Week after week I have passed

wires broken or about to be broken by pine trees planted foolishly within a foot of the fence line; but starting on an

old fence is as dangerous as starting on an old’ house or an

old coat. If you start you cant stop. So already this ram has learnt to put his head and shoulders uncer the lowest of the tight wires-and heave. My only defence is the fact that acquired characteristics are not transmitted.

MARCH 23.

atl T was a little moving to read in the newspapers that a Mr. Cyril Clemens, of Missouri, is trying to get in touch with people in New Zealand who "may remember anecdotes and jokes" associated with the visit of Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1895. People interested enough in Mark Twain in 1895

to get to his lectures and remember his jokes must have been

born. not later than, say, 1870, and are therefore well on the way now to 90, if they still survive. There are certainly rare men as old as that with good memories and a remaining power to express themselves clearly on paper. Two of them occasionally write to me about this Calendar. But there can’t be many of them anywhere; and when we consider what a small band Mark Twain's hearers must have been in the first place, it is difficult to feel hopeful about the response to this appeal by his kinsman. There is the strong probability, too, that if any survivors from his New Zealand audiences do remember his jokes, they will not be jokes perpetrated only in New Zealand. Lecturers are like preachers, teachers, journalists and world-champion shearers: they can’t be origina] all the time. But it would be a first-class joke if a genuine Mark Twain witticism came out of New Zealand as fresh as Mark made it appear the first time he tried it on Dunedin. The only man I have myself known who attended one of those lectures because he was a fervent admirer of the

lecturer was my own father, who must have been 65-it gives me a shock to establish-when, the lectures were delivered, Mark Twain and Dickens were the only two writers I ever heard him say he had seen in the flesh, and I can’t decide which must have given him most pleasure. Dickens was 18 years older than he was, Mark Twain five years younger, and they were, I suspect, the only two writers of his own generation he ever read. a: Fa *

MARCH 26

AM beginning to feel like the former Home Secretary who told the House of Commons recently that he was now afraid he.had sent an innocent man to the gallows. I have been killing opossums as often as I can, not because they are a menace to New Zealand, but because I have been blaming them for breaking the branches of my apple trees

and eating the fruit. The case against them certainly looks» black:

branches stripped and broken on Windless nights, apples half eaten by teeth capable of more than nibbling, leaves and fruit spurs scattered on the ground, hissing and chatterings up the trees after dark. But I have not yet succeeded in finding a recognisable piece of apple in an opossum’s stomach. The explanation may be that the few I trap are caught before the eating has begun, the successful eaters going free. The innocent have often suffered for the guilty at every zoological level since the earth was first populated; and if it happens above and below them it must happen | to marsupials, too. But every opossum’s stomach I have opened has been filled,. or partly filled, with well-chewed leaves, and contained nothing else but digestive juices and mucus. I hope there will be no opossums near when I try to sneak into Heaven. My crime is not only killing them without proof of guilt, but killing them with the aid of steel traps. Poisoning them is/too dangerous to other frequenters.of the orchard. Shooting them means getting out of bed in the middle of the night, finding them in a tree where shooting is safe, getting them in the beam of a spotlight, and hitting them infallibly in the head. Trapping them) means getting up, too, if’'I hear them, but I don’t always hear the commotion when’ they are: first caught, and»after that. they are silent. When daylight comes. they-look at me. with such ‘a combination of hostility and misery that I see myself as I am and think of it all T sychat ‘they .were innocent, ically they are-I would nomy 1 trees has ‘give up 7 sean ster Be oe pts (Fe