Mutton birds and other birds

Front matter

THE GIFT OF

TO THE

MUTTON BIRDS AND OTHER BIRDS

Contents

Chapter Page

III. FIRST CAMP ON ISLAND ... ... 18

IV. FOVEAUX STRAIT ... ... ... 31

Chapter II. Herekopere

)LL Mutton Birds, I was told, lay on November 25th, and such as cannot reach the land at that date drop their eggs during flight, or whilst at rest on the water.

Statements so remarkable, and repeated on all hands, certainly whetted my desire to know more of these members of the Petrel tribe; and at once these too confident assertions proved to be erroneous.

During January, February, and part of March I had many opportunities of visiting the breeding quarters of these and other Petrels both on Stewart Island itself, and on adjacent islets and rocks. Later in the same year, during part of September, the whole of October, and November, and part of December, I was again in these southern latitudes. Thrice also on two of the small wind-swept islets that lie south of Foveaux Strait and east of Stewart Island, camps were established for intervals of varying duration.

These, my credentials, I know, are scanty and sparse, and my remarks as impertinent to the Petrels, as to the inhabitants of a continent is

AND OTHER BIRDS U

the volume written on their ways and views by a tripper on a summer tour.

What is required— I shall manage it some day — is a two years' constant residence, and a watchfulness kept up during every day and every night of each of the fifty-two weeks.

Oh, these delightful islets of the south, their clean seas and wooded shores. We were free, beyond recall for days. It was delightful to wake like a child eager for the day, to whom still the world is fresh and to whom each hour brings wonder and surprise, to chew the cud of yesterday's discoveries, the morrow's to anticipate. Then what good fellows were the fishing folk. All my life I have known gillies and gamekeepers to be the best of company, and now I found myself intimately connected with a class of man equally simple and with the same width of outside interests.

Herekopere, or, as it is often called, Te Marama, is one of the many islets that dot the ocean east of Stewart Island. It lies about eight miles out from Half Moon Bay, and consists of perhaps two or three hundred peaty acres. Rising abruptly from deep seas, with here a rock and there a reef maned with bull kelp it is hard of approach except on the west. There beneath the rotting cliffs of red granitic schist, stretches a pebbled beach, the enormous pebbles piled deep on one another, the smallest larger than a moa's egg, and thousands larger than a giant's head; they are round and perfectly smooth, their great weight, I suppose, preventing the slide that gives to shingle on shelving shores, its characteristic form.

This beach lay almost directlv beneath the hut where we camped, and it was magnificent in a heavy sea, to listen to the growl and rumble of these pebbles, tossed and boiling in the surf.

Herekopere is a favourite breeding resort of Petrels of many kinds, the surface possessing attributes not apparently to be found in such perfection on the neighbouring islands. Perhaps the blanket of peat may be more deep, perhaps the granite grit of a more porous character. Petrels, at any rate, breed on it in hundreds of thousands, and comparatively neglect equally suitable looking islands,, distant but half a mile, and a mile. The character of its soil varies with the contour of each part. On the flat uplands it is almost pure peat ; on the steep slopes and where scrub grows> there is an admixture of leaf mould, and on the crumbling face of the granite cliffs it is chiefly decomposing schist. Everywhere the land is exceedingly fertile, greasy with oil and bird manure, and enriched with centuries of moulted down. Immense numbers of birds, too, perish from time to time, as for instance when to my knowledge in 1911 scores of thousands of Kuaka in the down died of starvation.

Each season also multitudes of alighting birds are, like Absalom, caught by the head in theforks of trees, or snared by the wing or foot in the tangles of black vine.

Although over a quarter of its surface light bush grows, there is not one large tree on the island. The average height of the Herekopere scrub is twenty or twenty-five feet, and the mixed species of which it is composed, prefer the centre and more sheltered parts. These low woods tail off usuallv into thickets of thebranched nettle, well named Ferox. Three or four kinds of fern, the New Zealand spinach, trailing rankly where an overhead gap affords light and air, make up with a few other plants the little-varied undergrowth.

Ferns, however, in these Mutton Bird islands never seem to me to be happy. They can tolerate, but cannot enjoy the salt of the blown spray and the hot stimulus of bird-droppings.

The whole southern slope of the island, often precipitous, and everywhere cumbered with slabs of granite, is a tangle of black vine, stranded, knotted and coiled, whilst amongst and above it grow clumps of veronica with green wood only at the top.

Near the whares, and possibly where a clearing may have been once attempted, grows a dense meadow of the strong, handsome island grass. Another patch of this grass, less dense and rank, has taken possession of the eastern headland of the island, where some years ago the peat was accidentally fired, and where it continued for some days to smoulder.

Elsewhere the uplands of peat sustain a crop of low cut leaf bracken, its growth different indeed from the magnificent pea-green shoots that in spring uncurl alike on the edges of the hot water creeks of the volcanic area and on the high cold beech woods of the Motu and Mangatu. Amongst this bracken's miserable short fronds, apart from one another and with ample room for each to develop his handsome habit, and unaffected on top or side shoot even by the tremendous gales of these regions, grow groundsel trees scattered in park-like isolation. Mutton Bird scrub is its island name, and even when growing in masses on the cliffs of the islets or on the most wind-swept bluffs of Stewart Island itself, the thick, leathery, white-backed leaves make it a striking plant. In the peat its seed germinates very freely; whereas of the daisy tree, covered in summer with myriads of purple-centred white-petalled blooms, I could discover no young plants in any part of this island. It grows only not much above highwater mark, and like the groundsel tree is totally unaffected by blast or salt spray.

Beside the main tracks radiating from the hut to every quarter of the island, and re-opened by slashers at the beginning of each Mr ding season, there are other trails, — a perfect system of arteries and veins, quite dissimilar to any path of man or beast hitherto known to me. They are bird roads, trails up which the birds flap at dusk, and down which at dawn they pour themselves. On these bird ways there is no grading ; the centre of each is rough and clawed, and tends to become in the wet climate of the south a miniature water channel. On either side for a foot or so the vegetation is beaten and peat stained where thousands of eager wings have flapped and bruised the tender fronds of fern, the tips of vine tendrils, the shoots of sprouting grass.

My first visit to Herekopere was late in January, 1911, my companion, a half-caste lad who had been mutton-birding on the island for two seasons. The sea was calm, and the summer day cloudless. Landing, therefore, was easyr and we scrambled eagerly up the steep bank from the rim of giant pebbles, the one of us keen to show, the other to see.

The whole island smelt of birds, and with the loosening of the dry flax fastening of the whare door it was immediately apparent how numerous they must be. The hut floor was strewn with the' bodies of Petrels that had dropped down the great open chimney and been unable to escape. Their carcases were not in any degree offensive, perhaps because of extreme inanition. None of them, moreover, were flyblown; indeed, I do not recollect, either on this occasion or later, a blow fly on Herekopere.

On the island, birds of many species were both very numerous and very tame. In the hut itself a pair of Robins had built, and never before had I been able to identify so many species in so short a time. During our six hours on the island I noted twenty different kinds, — the Wax Eye, Black-backed Gull, Kittiwake, the Sea Swallow, Tui, Yellow Breast Tit, Pied Shag, and another species of Shag, Pigeon, Fern Bird, and Sea Hawk.

We got a Harrier's nest composed entirely of the skeletons of the detached wings of Kuaka fledglings.

The Long-tailed Cuckoo was very plentiful and very noisy. Its screech at this time of the year, almost, as it were, spat forth, so vehement was the utterance, and sometimes it was answered from a distance by a note not unlike a rapid, low tapping or hammering.

About the tall alien mallows and wild oats and sow thistles growing in the vicinity of the hut many Yellow-fronted Parrakeets were feeding. One Weka was heard, but for some reason or another the breed do not on Herekopere display the interest shewn elsewhere in man and his belongings; they are very scarce certainly, but

I think it is remarkable we should not have had their company at our hut on this or on any other visit.

We also got four kinds of Petrel in their "burrows, — the Mutton Bird, Parara, Titi Wainui, and the Kuaka. The family affairs of the first-named we found in all stages of progress, — in one burrow a pair . of old birds who ran off in a sulking fashion and shamming lameness, in another an egg much incubated, and in a third a very plump chick, clad in grey down, and about three weeks old.

As a matter of fact Mutton Birds, instead of laying their eggs on the 25th November enjoy a rather unusually protracted breeding season, and T myself have got eggs of this breed as late as the end of February.

One or two dead Titi Wainui were found hung up in the scrub ; and the twentieth species was made up by a Parara chick which we photographed.

The young of the Kuaka were everywhere -dying and dead. About the burrow mouths, amongst the scrub, and on the bird paths along the coasts they lay sometimes seven and eight together. Hunger had driven them forth in the down prematurely, and the death evaded in their holes, had gathered them in the open by tens of thousands, and perhaps by hundreds of thousands.

This enormous mortality must, I think, have been due to a failure of food supply in the immediate vicinity; for with his limited powers of flight this little Petrel would be peculiarly -affected by even a local famine.

My next visit to Herekopere was on

PLATE VI.

Kuaka Chick.

September 22nd, and was brief owing to adverse weather conditions. We found neither the Mutton bird, Titi Wainui, nor the Kuaka in any of the numerous holes probed and examined. The Parara was no doubt sitting, for the noise of the bird disturbed by our footsteps and protesting from the cavernous depths of its burrow was frequently heard ; and a fortnight later eggs of this breed just about to hatch were got in several burrows.

It was evident from experience gained in this island that not all, at any rate, of the Mutton Birds laid their eggs on the one day. In order, however, to discover the earliest date upon which this Petrel lays we determined to camp on the islet and particularly to make a point of witnessing the occurrences on the mysterious 25th November — that day on which every Petrel of this breed deposits its egg, "on land for preference, but otherwise on the surface of the

Chapter III. First Camp On Island

I HERE is no more inspiring prospect than the anticipation of new open-air experiences. I confess I longed to sleep in that whare over the pebble beach and to wake in the morning with ocean all around, perhaps happily for a few glimmering moments even to believe myself in very truth marooned, at the very least to feel the recollections thronging back of boys' books with their lore of the seas, their bold buccaneers, and pirates bearded and bronzed. They may have had their weaknesses, these brave men ; they could not have been wholly bad; for they lived under the wide skies and knew all weather signs, the play of the tides, the portents of the flights of birds. Their habits were quite unconventional; their crimes have delighted generations of boys, and were committed wholly in the open.*

*In spite of an allusion to certain ' playing fields ' that might make it seem otherwise, I believe Captain Hook to have been an O.K. There is no such name as Hook in the School lists of his time. It was for this reason that the Captain endured the rather heartless allusion to his iron hand. It was in keeping with his character. The whole tenour of his life showed him to have been a man almost painfully anxious to do the right thing. To have taken another fellow's name would have been simply rotten form, and Hook knew it. Except when engaged in business the Captain was of a quiet and taciturn disposition, and authors, like other people, can make mistakes. Mr. Barrie may have taken him up wrong or heard him imperfectly perhaps in a general conversation.

We were early astir to forestall any wind ; for often in these parts the local breeze, sometimes fresh and sometimes faint, does not blow up till seven or eight o'clock, and we intended to breakfast on the island. There was little swell on the sea as we left our anchorage in Half Moon Bay, and even the drizzle of a raw morning was unable to damp the hopes of our setting forth.

Before six on October 2nd the "Te Atua" was lying off the island's western shore and opposite the pebble beach. With a rumble of running chain and a splash we had anchored. OUT- gear was dropped into the towed boat, — camera cases, bread, blankets, lastly McLean and myself and our super-excellent Leask who was to return with the boat,

Steadying her just outside the break, we waited for a big wave, and running in on its back had hauled her out of the surf before another broke and filled her stern.

It had been arranged that our stay on the island should be for a couple of nights, but we had taken five days food supplies in addition. Even then Leask pressed fish hooks on us, and the last heard of him was a yelled reminder from the departing boat to be careful of them, for the last lot of mutton-birders had been storm stayed and nearly starved.

The drizzle had by this time become rain, and through the water laden island grass and up the very steep and very greasy path we carried our stuff. The hut stood on the very edge of the island and overlooked the rocks and beach ; half of it was supported on high piles, the other half rested on the levelled soil of the slope. On the landward side extended the narrow lean-to, its floor very earthy and damp with oozings from the bank above, and along and over which birds ran all night.

Our dog, " Ban jo," who had already accompanied us in other expeditions and whom I had again been able to borrow was, until a better place could be found, fastened to one of the piles; but even thus restricted, and away from my restraining eye, he immediately dug out a couple of poor little Kuaka.

Upon unfastening the door we found that even since our last visit many more Petrels had contrived to imprison themselves in the hut.

This was the most comfortable of all our camps ; the room was large, the roof quite rainproof; whilst beneath the lean-to was collected an ample supply of dry firewood, permission to use which had been granted by the proprietor. On either side of the open fireplace there was a bunk, and light was admitted by a window at the side and another at the end of the whare. A short form and several cases served for seats; and during the past mutton bird season children must have accompanied the elders of the party, for on sheets of foolscap there were long lists of words for use in dictation. There was a tattered old "Royal Reader" too, in which I was pleased once more to read the story of the ill-tempered tailor who pricked with his needle the trunk of the elephant, of the officer whose pet tiger licked his hand, and other old friends in prose and verse.

Evidences of bird oil were everywhere, — the table, bunks, and floor stained with its dark markings; the whole island indeed was permeated with the taste and smell of birds. The

PLATE VIII.

Daisy Tree, Herekopere.

cask water, even when boiled, tasted of oil ; and the rain which fell every day had at least this advantage that it replenished our tins with clean water.

The one little brook would have been, I am quite sure, unfit for use, draining as it did acres of Petrel burrows.

None of the birds of the island other than the Petrel tribe had yet begun to nest, although the Black-backed Gulls were calling uneasily over the vicinity of their future breeding grounds; and although we found Sea Hawk on the eastern point beginning to resent intrusion, swooping and screaming — if such a designation can be applied to their puny cry, faint even when most furious.

In a deep bay to the north were congregations of Kittiwakes and Sea Swallows also beginning to feel themselves injured by an approach to the chosen site of their future nests. With none of these superterranean species laying, all our work was of a horrid rheumatic troglodytic sort, and rather resembled digging out bogged rabbits than clean bird nesting.

The fierce Parara, very easily distinguished on account of his broad bill with laminated edges, we found to be the most forward of the Petrels. The rather blunt egg was much incubated and peat stained and with its original white changed when dry to a ferruginous red. One sitting bird which we took for identification and which was skinned by McLean turned out on examination to be a male.

The burrow of the Parara varies in length from three to four or five feet, and the egg lies on leaves of "mutton bird scrub" and fragments of cut-leaf bracken, these resting on branchlets and sticks coated and crusted with dirt. The quantity of material used in nidification was dependent we thought on the condition of the burrow, and from the manner in which the poor material was laid in the centre of the nest hollow it was evident that the egg alone was cared for. There was no attempt at lining the remainder of the burrow's base, and the sitting bird squatted on wet and often soaked peat.

In the exceptionally rainy season of 1911 many of the holes were woefully wet and the roofs and sides of the breeding chambers in the gritty sticky condition of undried plaster work. The birds' tail feathers were draggled and saturated, and incubation must have been a rheumatic business indeed.

We could not discover that any of the small, gentle-natured Kuaka were yet sitting. At this date during the day time most of their little burrows were vacant ; only in a small proportion were to be found either a single egg or two birds together. When a pair were together I took the joint occupancy as the earliest stage of housekeeping— settling in, as it were.

There is something very engaging about the little Kuaka, and McLean and I became very partial to him, just as folk feel partiality in an extreme degree to a friend who has something a little ludicrous as well as lovable about him. The little fellow was always so fussy and agitated when, on the high seas, we ran into one of his parties scuttling along the wave tops and plunging with such undignified haste and as if just in time — only just in time — to save a sprawl and somersault. Pity, too, was a factor in our affection, for to a great extent it is to be feared the breed "but subserves another's need." The Sea Hawk and no doubt the Black-backed Gull take him at will, and I have seen the Mollymawk, too, swoop and threaten.

A 'third kind of Petrel, the Titi Wainui, we also found in occupation of its burrow, but with no egg laid. The nesting habits and burrows of this species are much like those of the Parara, but the bird itself smaller, less fierce in defence, and with the beak much less broad.

The Mutton Bird, in spite of Banjo's nose, and the constant use in scores of likely holes of our supple-jack wand, we failed to locate. There were, in fact, but a very few birds of this species either sitting or in occupation of holes.

To photograph these several kinds of birds it was, of course, necessarv to open up their breeding chambers, and however gently and carefully the work was done the birds became restless. Hiding their heads in the dark corners and scraping violently with their feet they refused to face the lens. Then, as their eyes grew accustomed to the light, the birds never ceased to attempt escape, and running up and down the exposed length of chamber soon ruined their beautiful plumage in the clammy peat. Sprawling on the saturated soil, wet above and wet below, with arms and hands engrained with dirt that caked, and could hardly be scraped off, was melancholy work indeed, and a trial even to the enthusiast.

As the afternoon of this our first full day on the island wore on, the birds in their burrows, the Kuaka, the Titi Wainui, and certainly also, though we could not actually locate him, the Mutton Bird, single or in pairs, sitting on eggs or in occupation only, became more noisy and began to call at more frequent intervals. Our trampling, too, as we moved about the perforated peat seemed to excite or disturb these cave dwellers to a greater degree.

As the light waned this restlessness increased till with the earliest inflight of returning birds a murmur and wail arose from every occupied hole.

We were fortunate in obtaining our first view of the petrel flight under circumstances favourable to eye and ear. The weather had improved, the skies were clear, and, except for the expectant break and the recurrent silence of each wave's ebb, all was still. About seven the earliest of the Kuaka began to arrive; at first here a bird and there a bird ; then almost at once it began to hail Kuaka, then to sleet Kuaka, and lastly to snow Kuaka. They reached the island in dozens, scores, hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, and I verily believe perhaps in millions. At first they hurtled themselves in like hailstones, then later fell with some degree of regard to their safety, and lastly lit softly as snow and with hardly a rustle.

Although standing on a conspicuous spot on a rise in open ground and guarding my head and face I was struck by Kuaka eight times in a few minutes. They were dropping thickly into the vines and nettles, the f oliosa grass, the soft bare ground, and inland and a little behind me falling like ripe fruit through the branches of the scrub. They were thumping, too, on the whare roof.

The Kuaka never circles or hesitates, but always flies very fast and straight in from the sea, but the final drop is vertical or not a pane of glass in the whare windows could have remained intact.

The difference in the sound of the fall of the early, late, and latest Kuaka may perhaps be ascribed to the altering light : on the other hand it may be caused by the impetuosity of affection,, the first comers being perhaps the mates of the single birds in lonely occupation of their holes ; the next lot those arriving without intent toselect at once; and the last detachment feeling in a lesser degree the influence of love and spring.

This amazing influx of Kuaka continued for about half an hour, although for long after that huge parties of stragglers continued intermittently to arrive.

Each morning we might have gathered them as the Israelites gathered from the wildernesstheir quail ; each morning the bird-fall overnight had landed Petrels in the kerosene tin used for carriage of water — on one occasion there were three birds in it. Every empty box flat on its base contained birds. They fell down the chimney, they floated in our water cask.

A little later than the main body of the Kuaka, the Parara and Titi Wainui began toreach the island in thousands, and Mutton Birdsperhaps in hundreds.

The mode of landing of each of these three species was less precipitate, the birds passing and repassing many times over the island, circling and wheeling in enormous loops, now clear against the sky, now lost in the blackness of the land. In every direction, high and low, the sky was crossed by their curves, and the heavens.

were like a map marked with the orbits of innumerable stars.

The Mutton Bird, in especial, I could never willingly cease to watch, now high above the island, now barely sweeping clear of the grasses and fern, and at first with never a flicker of wing to break the still evenness of its magnificent flight.

Although well acquainted with the Albatross, I think this Petrel's night flight is almost a finer display of volant power. There seemed to be a pent energy, a fire of restlessness in the bird, the more marvellous because of an entire absence of any perceptible motive power. Maybe it was the glamour of night or that the emotion of the swiftly- wheeling bird moved something in the man not stirred by the vaster, slower balancings in distances more immense of the Albatross.

It was a never-ending interest to follow with the eye one of these living, moving lines of flight, to mark the earthward swoop, to trace it darkling across the island's bulk, to link up once again the half lost curve as it emerged black and distinct against the pale, pure, evening sky.

In each of these giant loops of flight, the bird most nearly touched earth over the mouth of his breeding burrow, but the speed at which the point of attraction was passed, at first gave hardly a hint of any desire to land. After many revolutions there came a time however, when a certain retardation of pace could be marked, and when the faintest hesitant wing flicker, the merest tremor of the extreme tips of the primaries could be observed. Still later, always just over the burrow, this tremor became a poise, — a poise interpolated for an instant in the bird's yet swift unwavering flight, and without apparent check to the speed of the skyward climb, a miracle of balanced flight. At last the bird would drop with a plump through scrub, or rustle with a run into tangles of vine.

Most of these flying Petrels arrived without a call of any sort. The Kuaka was quite silent; the Mutton Bird was also quite silent on this night, although later in the year, but even then very rarely, I have heard him call on the wing, — a call, I may say, entirely dissimilar to the "Te-te-te" and '"burr" of the Petrel that during December can be heard at night flying inland over many parts of the east coast of the North Island.

From either the Parara or Titi Wainui, ghost-like in their pale blue plumage now almost turned to white, came a rare "Zp-zp."

About eight or nine o'clock there were hundreds of thousands or, as I have computed, millions, of birds on the island, the vast majority of them being Kuaka, The air was gorged with sound as when bees swarm or lambs bleat in thousands together. Each species was calling its own call, and singing its own song. The predominant sounds seemed to me to be "Ku-kukia," endlessly repeated, and a long-drawn "Koe-koe-oe-oe-o," with something of a wail in it. I feel sure, however, there was no sadness that night amongst the Petrels. The island was like a fair, the eager arrivals running hither and thither inspecting, rejecting, visiting, courting, and chanting their subterranean lyrics. This ceaseless eagerness and feverish activity reminded me of nothing so much as when whilst I have been angling, a sudden hatch of fly has occurred in which the males outnumber the females by a thousand to one.

Many of the Kuaka burrows were really alive with revelry, and must have entertained as many visitors as that house on the walls of Jericho, where for a night the spies lay hidden on the roof. All night long the Kuaka were streaming in and out of their holes, stealing over the surface like rats, and like rats, too, when alarmed, scuttling off in the half light along the ragged paths but never even when pressed, rising to fly.