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“If I might be a sea-dove, I'd fly across the main
To the pleasant Isle of Aves, to look at it once again.”

—Kingsley's “Last Buccaneer.”

It was in the grey-and-rose dawn that our little Nautilus lay-to off the Island one summer morning of long ago, and we pulled over the long ground-swell in the dinghy and watched our chance between the seas to jump ashore on the rugged boulder bank, where rocks rolled and crunched upon each other with every in-send of the surf. But even before we dropped into the dinghy we heard the birds, above the growling noises of the coast. The tui and the bell-bird were chanting away at morning song—I suppose hundreds of them—in the pohutukawa trees and the manuka thickets that fringed the shore.

The sun had not yet shown himself over the sea-rim; a long blanket of mist swathed the mountain tops, and the air was raw and damp; but every bird in the Maori groves was piping and gurgling and bell-ringing. They were all around us when we landed, fluttering and hopping about the branches, some of them sucking the honey from the flowers, hanging to the twigs—often upside down—others seeming to give all their energies to the morning's music. It was an entrancing hour—a dawntime pleasure that I have recaptured in part many times since, but only once in such overwhelming measure, and that was in a deep valley among the forest ranges of the Urewera Country. What pen can reproduce the enchantment of such moments? Sometimes a New Zealand poet comes near it, as in Satchell's rime of a bell-bird's song:

“Oh, hush! Oh, hear! A goblin chime;
The dew-drop trembles on the branch;
A solo sweet, a scattered rhyme,
A golden avalanche.”

Sometimes a musician attempts to reproduce it. But what flute, what pipe, what human voice can faithfully give us even those three deep, rich, dropping notes of the tui, “the essence of pure sound,” that the Northern Maoris interpret as “Pa-re-ro”?

But here we are under the Christmas-trees of Hauturu Island, otherwise the Little Barrier, high-peaked, densely-timbered, walled with dark cliffs of volcanic rock, dissected by gorges and gullies, with high steep ridges rising between like green-garmented ribs. Here, fifteen miles from the mainland, moated by the ocean, harbourless, bayless, wooded as it was a thousand years ago, fog-draped, surf-washed—here is the most secure of all New Zealand's many island homes set apart as national refuge-places for the native birds. It is, one is free to fancy, the Garden of Eden all over again, without the Serpent—at any rate, an Eden for the Maori birds, and in particular for those members of the bush bird-family that are too quickly disappearing from the mainland before the direct attacks of animal pests and the indirect, but even more deadly, destroying march of the settler and the bushfeller.

You can see from the Auckland hills the faint blue summit of Hauturu, like a serrated whaleback, the loftiest island in the waters of the Hauraki; it looks a place of faerydom from afar, a shadow of an island. Nearer, it looms blue-black of colour, even grim of contour; it looks a palisaded hold, this bold steep-to isle, and it is fortunate for the birds that it is so rough and forbidding of approach. You find it different when you land, but—supposing you have official sanction to visit it—the difficulty is to make that landing. We were weather-bound in Little Omaha Cove for two days before a favourable slant and comparatively smooth seas gave us the chance that morning, wn Eden of birds; though there is no serpent, it is not without its curses—the pakeha rat and the wild cat—and, I suppose there were such prowling creatures even in Paradise. Isle of Aves—yes, and pleasanter even than the Last Buccaneer's beside the Spanish Main, for those tropic birds may be gorgeous of plumage, but they are unmusical, croaking things by comparison with our sober-coated tui and bellbird, and the little riroriro of Alan Mulgan's praise, the grey warbler, whose plaintive yet cheery trill always seems only half-finished—

“So much of beauty all around,
But none more dear
Than this small hidden bird's sweet sound,
Following the changing pageant of the year
With daily note, half joy and half regret.”