The Importing Curse.

Some American has been telling a Wanga-nui paper that New Zealand really ought to get some birds for its forests, and he suggests the wild canary and the Chinese parrot! There is really no end to the diabolical craze of would-be acclimatisators to introduce strange animals and birds to these benighted wilds of ours. The importation of page 36 undesirables has been going on for seventy years or more, and the marvel is that we have any birds of our own surviving at all. Now-a-days the Government is more vigilant, and the unwanteds in most cases find the doors barred against them, but the bush is overrun with enemies of the birds, weasels, opossums, stoats and the like. Alien birds have robbed the Maori birds of their food supplies; every introduced bird in the bush means so much less for the natives. And the Chinese parrot is surely the crazy limit. Fortunately it won't get any further than the suggestion stage, as with that amazing idea propounded some years back that the Canadian fox and the beaver would be such suitable animals for the Fiordland forests.