t night in a country possessing no native beasts of prey, it has
almost lost the power of flight, and uses its wings only as a sort of
parachute to break its fall in descending from a rock or tree to its
accustomed feeding-ground. To get up again, it climbs, parrot-like,
with its hooked claws, up the surface of the trunk or the face of a
precipice.

Even more aberrant in its ways, however, than the burrowing owl-parrot,
is that other strange and hated New Zealand lory, the kea, which, alone
among its kind, has abjured the gentle ancestral vegetarianism of the
cockatoos and macaws, in favour of a carnivorous diet of singular
ferocity. And what is odder still, this evil habit has been developed
in the kea since the colonization of New Zealand by the English, those
most demoralizing of new-comers. The settlers have taught the Maori to
wear tall hats and to drink strong liquors: and they have thrown
temptation in the way of even the once innocent native parrot. Before
the white man came, in fact, the kea was a mild-mannered fruit-eating
or honey-sucking bird. But as soon as sheep-stations were established
in the island these degenerate parrots began to acquire a distinct
taste for raw mutton. At first, to be sure, they ate only the sheep's
heads and offal that were thrown out from the slaughter-houses picking
the bones as clean of meat as a dog or a jackal. But in process of
time, as the taste for blood grew upon them, a still viler idea entered
into their wicked heads. The first step on the downward path suggested
the second. If dead sheep are good to eat, why not also living ones?
The kea, pondering deeply on this abstruse problem, solved it at once
with an emphatic affirmative. And he straightway proceeded to act upon
his convictions, and invent a really hideous mode of procedure.
Perching on the backs of the living sheep he has now learnt the exact
spot where the kidneys are to be found; and he tears open the flesh to
get at these dainty morsels, which he pulls out and devours, leaving
the unhappy animal to die in miserable agony. As many as two hundred
ewes have thus been killed in a night at a single station. I need
hardly add that the sheep-farmer naturally resents this irregular
proceeding, so opposed to all ideals of good grazing, and that the days
of the kea are now numbered in New Zealand. But from the purely
psychological point of view the case is an interesting one, as being
the best recorded instance of the gr