Identifier: muttonbirdsother00guth (find matches)
Title: Nest and Eggs of Kuaka, in Mutton birds and other birds
Year: 1914 (1910s)
Authors: Guthrie-Smith, H. (Herbert), 1861-1940
Subjects: Birds -- New Zealand
Publisher: Christchurch, N.Z. : Whitcombe and Tombs
Contributing Library: American Museum of Natural History Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library

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re-opened by slashers at the beginning of each birding 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 easy, 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.
Plate V.
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Nest and Eggs of Kuaka.
AND OTHER BIRDS 15 The wh(>l( island smelt of birds, and with the loosening of the dry flax fastening of the whare door it was immediately a)i))arent how numerous tliey nmst be. The hut floor was strewn with the bodies of Petrels that had dropped down the great open chimney and been imable 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 A^ery tame. In the hut itself a pair of Robins had built, and never before had I been able t 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

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