"How about the parrots?" Fred asked, when the rabbit question was disposed of.
"That is a strange piece of history," replied Mr. Abbott. "When the sheep-farmers first established their stations among the mountains there were flocks of the kea, or green parrot, living in the glens and feeding entirely on fruit and leaves. They were beautiful birds, and nobody suspected any harm from them.
"After a time it was observed that many of the sheep, and they were invariably the finest and fattest of the flocks, had sores on their backs, and always in the same place, just over the kidneys. Some of the sores were so slight that the animals recovered, but the most of them died or had to be killed to end their sufferings.
"The cause of these sores was for some time a mystery, but at length a herdsman on one of the high ranges declared his belief that the green parrots were the murderers of the sheep. He was ridiculed and laughed at, but was soon proved to be right, as a parrot was seen perched on the back of a fat sheep and tearing away the flesh.
"Investigation showed that in the severe winters the parrots had come at night to the gallows, where the herdsmen hung the carcasses of slaughtered sheep. They picked off the fat from the mutton, and showed a partiality for that around the kidneys; how they ever connected the carcasses with the living sheep is a subject for the naturalists to puzzle over, and especially how they knew the exact location of the spot where the choicest fat was found in the living animal. It seems that the attacks on the sheep began within a few months after the parrots had first tasted mutton at the meat-gallows."
"Have they done much damage?" one of the youths asked.
"Yes, a great deal," was the reply; "but not so much of late years, as they are being exterminated. One man lost nineteen fine imported sheep out of a flock of twenty, killed by the parrots; and another lost in the same way two hundred in a flock of three hundred. Every flock in the mountains suffers some from this cause, probably not less than two per cent.
"A shilling a head is now paid for keas, and there is a class of men who hunt them for the sake of the reward; but the sagacious birds
that the stock depasturing it had shrunk to 1,200 sheep dying in the paddock at the homestead; 110,000 sheep to 1,200 sheep! "The rabbits had to account for the deficiency. On that station they had eaten up and destroyed all the grass and herbage; they had barked all the edible shrubs and bushes, and had latterly themselves begun to perish in thousands."
