Page:Picturesque New Zealand, 1913.djvu/343

Rh The kea is a very inquisitive bird, and it is equally bold. Along the Tasman Glacier keas peck at the nails in one's boots and with their beaks test one's clothing. A guide told me that one had even perched on the toe of his boot. At Malte Brun Hut one day, I drew four or five keas about me on a large flat-topped rock. At first they were three or four feet away from me, but very gradually and cautiously they approached until the beak of one was within an inch of the metal-headed pencil I held in one hand. Then the bird backed away. Soon a bolder one joined my audience, and, after much meditation and searching scrutiny, actually took the pencil from my hand. But he did not seem to care for it, for he almost immediately dropped it. In front of another kea I held a pocket mirror. Seeing himself reflected in it, he warily peered over the mirror, apparently expecting to find a bird on the other side. When he learned that he had been deceived, he walked away in evident disgust. On the morrow we resumed our journey up the glacier. The Tasman Glacier is a wonderful spectacle, or, rather, a combination of wonderful spectacles. It has ice canyons and caves; ice shafts from one to two hundred feet deep; waterfalls that pour over icy ledges; streams that flow in icy tunnels; and millions of tons of boulders and broken rock torn from the mountains.

At its terminal moraine, about twenty-five hundred feet above the sea, is an unsightly mass of ice and stone; at its head a mile and a half above the tides, its surface