Shepherds and station hands wage war on the kea, sometimes encouraged thereto by a bounty; for there are run-holders and local councils who will give one, two, or three shillings for each bird killed. Let a pair of keas be seen near a shepherd’s hut, and the master runs for his gun, while his wife will imitate the bird’s long whining note to attract them downwards; for, venturesome and rapacious as the kea is, he is just as confiding and sociable as the gentler kaka, and can be lured by the same devices. Stoats and weasels, too, harass him on their own account. Thus the bird’s numbers are kept down, and the damage they do to flocks is not on the whole as great as of yore. Indeed, some sceptics doubt the whole story, while other flippant persons suggest that the kea’s ravages are chiefly in evidence when the Government is about to re-assess the rents of the Alpine runs. Against these sneers, however, may be quoted a large, indeed overwhelming, mass of testimony from the pastoral people of the back-country. This evidence seems to show that most keas do not molest sheep. The evil work is done by a few reprobate birds--two or three pairs out of a large flock, perhaps--which the shepherds nickname “butchers.” Only this year I was told of a flock of hoggets which, when penned up in a sheep-yard, were attacked by a couple of beaked marauders, who in a single night killed or wounded scores of them as they stood packed together and helpless. No laws, therefore, protect the kea, nor does any public opinion shield him from the gun in any month. His only defences are inaccessible mountain cliffs and the wild weather of winter and spring-time in the Southern Alps.