Page:Picturesque New Zealand, 1913.djvu/411

 extraordinary birds is the long-billed godwit. Every year the godwit makes a return journey of about fifteen thousand miles between the North Island and eastern Siberia. Arriving in New Zealand in September and October—spring in the Southern Hemisphere—it remains until autumn, and then takes flight for Asia.

Two other migrating birds are the shining cuckoo and the long-tailed cuckoo, the first arriving in New Zealand from New Guinea, the other from Polynesia. Considering the cuckoo's small size, this is a wonderful flight.

An astonishing feature of bird life in New Zealand is its great number of shags, or cormorants. That country has fourteen species, or half as many as are found in the entire world. The presence of so many shags there is accounted for by assuming that in ages past, when there was far more land in this part of the world, New Zealand was the meeting-place of two streams of birds, one from the Malay Archipelago and New Caledonia, the other from Antarctica.

The largest sea-bird in New Zealand waters is the albatross. Some of these birds are eighteen inches high, and their wings have a spread of from ten to fourteen feet.

A salt-water bird that is of uncommon interest because of its association with the tuatara lizard is Cook's petrel, a species of the mutton bird. So plentiful is this bird on the east coast of the North Island that cliffs are perforated with its burrows. Frequently it shares its home with the lizard, and the two seem to live