Page:The Kea, a New Zealand problem (1909).pdf/125

Rh seem to kill at uncertain intervals; and, after a big slaughter of the sheep, weeks and months may pass before they again begin their depredations.

Yet again, they usually confine their attacks to certain localities, and when the birds there are shot the killing may cease for years, if not altogether. Some shepherds put the annual loss in the Kea country at 30 or 40 per cent., but from what I can ascertain this is an exaggeration, for, if this percentage were killed annually, there would soon be no sheep left in the Kea-infested area.

Sometimes, at special places, the killing may be so severe that it becomes a very serious menace to the sheep-farmers, as can be seen from the following instances.

A musterer writes:—“I put a mob of sheep off the flat on to the hills at Makaroa Station, and, on going up the spur two days afterwards to where the sheep had encamped, I found six dead.”

Another gives the following:—“On the Minarets Station, I remember a mob of almost 1300 hoggets being put on a spur, and we only mustered 700 off it. The Keas no doubt were responsible for a large number of them.”

Three more must suffice.

“One year I had a bad muster; 400 woolly sheep came in at the beginning of winter when the snow fell and the sheep could not get away. I placed them, as I thought, in a safe position, on the hillside quite close to where I lived. In spring, when I went to have a look at them, the Keas had killed about 200 of them.”

A shepherd, on going to his flock, which he had left the night before, says: “I shot nineteen Keas, and on looking round I found that they had killed 38 sheep during the night. Most of them that I found were warm and in splendid condition. The flock consisted of 1600 sheep, and during the winter the Keas killed 300 out of that number, and, as there were a good many birds about, we shifted the sheep.”

A run-holder wrote to me, in 1907:—“No later than last week we came on 60 valuable ewes killed by them. One of my shepherds, Watherston, who has communicated with you