New Zealand

by William Pember Reeves

THE REES VALLEY AND RICHARDSON RANGE

Shepherds and station hands wage war on the kea, sometimes encouraged thereto by a bounty; for there are run-holders and local councils who will give one, two, or three shillings for each bird killed. Let a pair of keas be seen near a shepherd’s hut, and the master runs for his gun, while his wife will imitate the bird’s long whining note to attract them downwards; for, venturesome and rapacious as the kea is, he is just as confiding and sociable as the gentler kaka, and can be lured by the same devices. Stoats and weasels, too, harass him on their own account. Thus the bird’s numbers are kept down, and the damage they do to flocks is not on the whole as great as of yore. Indeed, some sceptics doubt the whole story, while other flippant persons suggest that the kea’s ravages are chiefly in evidence when the Government is about to re-assess the rents of the Alpine runs. Against these sneers, however, may be quoted a large, indeed overwhelming, mass of testimony from the pastoral people of the back-country. This evidence seems to show that most keas do not molest sheep. The evil work is done by a few reprobate birds—two or three pairs out of a large flock, perhaps—which the shepherds nickname “butchers.” Only this year I was told of a flock of hoggets which, when penned up in a sheep-yard, were attacked by a couple of beaked marauders, who in a single night killed or wounded scores of them as they stood packed together and helpless. No laws, therefore, protect the kea, nor does any public opinion shield him from the gun in any month. His only defences are inaccessible mountain cliffs and the wild weather of winter and spring-time in the Southern Alps.

Acclimatisation has made some woeful mistakes in New Zealand, for is it not responsible for the rabbit and the house-sparrow, the stoat and the weasel? On the other hand, it has many striking successes to boast of in the shape of birds, beasts, and fishes, which commerce and industry would never have brought to the islands in the regular way of business. Of these, one may select the deer among beasts, the trout among fishes, and the pheasant, quail, and starling among birds. Many colonists, it is true, would include skylarks, blackbirds, and thrushes among the good works for which acclimatising societies have to be thanked; but of late years these songsters have been compassed about with a great cloud of hostile witnesses who bear vehement testimony against them as pestilent thieves. No such complaints, however, are made against the red-deer, the handsomest wild animals yet introduced into New Zealand. Indeed, several provinces compete for the honour of having been their first New Zealand home. As a matter of fact, it would appear that as long ago as 1861 a stag and two hinds, the gift of Lord Petre, were turned out on the Nelson hills. Next year another small shipment reached Wellington safely, and were liberated in the Wairarapa. These came from the Royal Park at Windsor, and were secured by the courtesy of the Prince Consort.

In 1871 some Scottish red-deer were turned loose in the Otago mountains near Lakes Wanaka and Hawea. In all these districts the deer have spread and thriven mightily, and it is possible that the herds of the colony now number altogether as many as ten thousand. Otago sportsmen boast of the unadulterated Scottish blood of their stags, whose fine heads are certainly worthy of any ancestry. In the Wairarapa the remarkable size of the deer is attributed to the strain of German blood in the animals imported from the Royal Park. As yet, however, the finest head secured in the colony was not carried by a deer belonging to any of the three largest and best-known shooting-grounds of the islands. It was obtained in 1907 from a stag shot by Mr. George Gerard in the Rakaia Gorge in Canterbury. The Rakaia Gorge herd only dates from 1897, and is still small, but astonishing stories are told of some of its heads. At any rate the antlers of Mr. Gerard’s stag have been repeatedly measured. One of them is forty-seven inches long, the other forty-two inches and a half.

Deer-stalking in New Zealand can scarcely be recommended as an easy diversion for rich and elderly London gentlemen. It is not sport for the fat and scant-of-breath who may be suffering from sedentary living and a plethora of public banquets. New Zealand hills are steep, new Zealand forests and scrubs are dense or matted. Even the open country of the mountains requires lungs of leather and sinews of wire. The hunter when unlucky cannot solace his evenings with gay human society or with the best cookery to be found in a luxurious, civilised country. If he be an old bush-hand, skilful at camping-out, he may make himself fairly comfortable in a rough way, but that is all. Nor are such things as big drives, or slaughter on a large scale, to be had at any price. Shooting licences are cheap—they can be had from the secretary of an acclimatisation society for from one to three pounds; but the number of stags a man is permitted to shoot in any one district varies from two to six. To get these, weeks of physical labour and self-denial may be required. On the other hand, trustworthy guides may be engaged, and colonial hospitality may vary the rigours of camp life. Then, too, may be counted the delights of a mountain life, the scenery of which excels Scotland, while the freshness of the upland air is brilliant and exhilarating in a fashion that Britons can scarcely imagine. And to counterbalance loneliness, the hunter has the sensation of undisturbed independence and freedom from the trammels of convention, as he looks round him in a true wilderness which the hand of man has not yet gashed or fouled.

Wild-fowl shooting ranges from tame butchery of trustful native pigeons and parrots to the pursuit of the nimble godwit, and of that wary bird and strong flyer, the grey duck. The godwit is so interesting a bird to science that one almost wonders that ornithologists do not petition Parliament to have it declared tapu. They tell us that in the Southern winter it migrates oversea and makes no less a journey than that from New Zealand to Northern Siberia by way of Formosa and the Sea of Okhotsk. Even if this distance is covered in easy stages during three months’ time, it seems a great feat of bird instinct, and makes one regret that the godwit so often returns to our tidal inlets only to fall a prey to some keen sportsmen indifferent to its migratory achievements.

The only excuse for molesting the wood-pigeon is that he is very good to eat. The kaka parrot, too, another woodlander, makes a capital stew. Neither victim offers the slightest difficulty to the gunner—I cannot say sportsman. Indeed the kaka will flutter round the slayer as he stands with his foot on the wing of a wounded bird, a cruel but effective decoy-trick. Another native bird easy to hit on the wing is the queer-looking pukeko, a big rail with bright-red beak and rich-blue plumage. The pukeko, however, though he flies so heavily, can run fast and hide cleverly. Moreover, in addition to being good for the table, he is a plague to the owners of standing corn. In order to reach the half-ripe ears he beats down the tops of a number of stalks, and so constructs a light platform on which he stands and moves about, looking like a feathered stilt-walker, and feasting the while to his heart’s content. Grain-growers, therefore, show him no mercy, and follow him into his native swamps, where the tall flax bushes, toé-toé, and giant bulrushes furnish even so large a bird with ample cover. When, however, a dog puts him up, and he takes to the air, he is the easiest of marks, for any one capable of hitting a flying haystack can hit a pukeko.

Very different are the wild ducks. They soon learn the fear of man and the fowling-piece. They are, moreover, carefully protected both by law and by public opinion among sportsmen. So they are still to be found in numbers on lakes and lagoons by the sea-coast as well as in the sequestered interior. Large flocks of them, for example, haunt Lake Ellesmere, a wide brackish stretch of shallow water not many miles from the city of Christchurch. But in such localities all the arts of the English duck-hunter have to be employed, and artificial cover, decoys, and first-rate markmanship must be brought into play. The grey duck, the shoveller, and teal, both black and red, all give good sport. Strong of flight and well defended by thick, close-fitting suits of feathers, they need quick, straight shooting. A long shot at a scared grey duck, as, taking the alarm, he makes off down the wind, is no bad test of eye and hand. In return, they are as excellent game-birds dead as living. This last is more than can be said for the handsomest game-bird of the country, the so-called paradise duck. Its plumage, so oddly contrasting in the dark male and reddish white-headed female, makes it the most easily recognised of wild-fowl. It also has developed a well-founded suspiciousness of man and his traps, and so manages to survive and occupy mountain lakes and valleys in considerable flocks. Unlike the grey species which are found beyond the Tasman Sea, the smaller and more delicately framed blue duck is peculiar to the islands. It is neither shy nor common, and, as it does no harm to any sort of crop, law and public opinion might, one would think, combine to save it from the gun and leave it to swim unmolested among the boulders and rocks of its cold streams and dripping mountain gorges.