Foods of the Wilds.

The travellers considered themselves in luck when they found a place where weka or woodhen were plentiful. “The weka,” Brunner wrote in his diary, “is the most useful and valuable bird for a bushranger.” Sometimes they got grey duck, paradise duck and dabchicks in the streams. But the inhospitable black beech bush in the interior was sparsely inhabited by such birds as pigeon and kaka; there was no food for them there. Eels were the great standby in the bush commissariat, and the little fish upokororo was caught in fine-meshed flax nets in the streams. Out at the small settlements of the Maoris on the Coast there were potatoes, in limited quantities.