183
COTURNIX NOVAEZELANDIAEQUOY & GAIM.
(Plate 28, Fig. 2.)
- Coturnix Novae-Zelandiae Quoy and Gaimard, Voy. Astrolabe, Zool. I. p. 242, pl. 24, fig. 1 (1830—"Il habit la baie Chouraki (rivière Tamise de Cook), à la Nouvelle-Zélande"); Gould, Syn. B. Austr., text and pl. fig 2 (1837-38); Buller, B. New Zealand, p. 161, pl. (1873); Hist. B. New Zealand, 2nd ed. I, p. 225, pl. XXIII (1888); Grant, Cat. B. Brit. Mus. XXII p. 245 (1893).
This Quail, though a typical Coturnix, is easily distinguished from all other species. The male has the upper-side almost black, each feather bordered and indistinctly barred with rufous-brown, and with a wide, creamy white shaft-line. The throat and sides of the head are rufous-cinnamon, the feathers of the chest and breast at their basal half buff with a broken black cross-bar, the distal half black, with two pale buff spots near the tip, or with a continuous white border.
This sole representative of the "gamebirds" in New Zealand was in former days very numerous in both islands, but especially so in the South Island, wherever there was open grass-land, but is now evidently extinct. Its disappearance is apparently not due to excessive shooting, but rather to the introduction of rats, cats, and dogs, and last, but not least, to bush-fires and to the regular burning of the sheep-runs, according to Sir Walter Buller. No doubt the establishment itself of extensive sheep-farms in the once, more or less, uninhabited grass-land was ominous for the future of the Quail.
It is not quite clear when the Quail disappeared. The last on the North Island was shot by Captain Mair at Whangarei in 1860. Specimens were recorded in 1867 and 1869, but were apparently not procured. In Haast's "Journal of Exploration in the Nelson Province" it is said to be still very abundant in 1861 on the grassy plains of the interior.
Sir Walter Buller mentions two specimens said to be from an island in Blue Skin Bay, shot in "1867 or 1868." In his Second Edition of the Birds of New Zealand he informs us that it was found occasionally in the South Island down to 1875, but in the "Supplement" he speaks of a specimen said to have been shot in 1871, but adds, "There is no absolute evidence of it," and "if true, this individual bird must have been about the last of its race." Therefore, evidently the note about 1875 was erroneous.
