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Trend Task:
Reading Record – Non-Fiction |
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| BAND 4 |
| Kiwi:
New Zealand’s Remarkable Bird, by Neville Peat, (photo.)
Tui de Roy, Random House, NZ: 1999. |
| Introduction:
This extract called Kiwi provides us with some fascinating information about this rare and unusual bird. |
Text: 
The kiwi commands a unique place in the world of birds. Picture a shaggy,
burrowing, whiskered creature that prowls the forest floor at night
sniffing out its food. In a land devoid of terrestrial mammals save
two spieces of bat, the kiwi acts out the role of a small mammal –
a badger, for example, or perhaps an ant-eater.The kiwi is in fact the nearest thing to an animal in the bird world – a biological oddity. It is a bird withour a tail or wings, with hair-like feathers that resemble fur and it is oddly pear-shaped with a mole-like head. Imagine the kiwi head minus its bill. The shape, fluffiness and long whiskers are very animal-like. The kiwi is unquestionably an offshoot in the evolutionary story of birds. Found only in New Zealand, it is living proof of the lengths to which birds will go to adapt to their habitats and circumstances. Kiwi ancestry spans millions of years. No one knows for sure whether its distant ancestors flew but clearly the kiwi lost the power of flight eons ago and retains only pathetically small wing bones, roughly the size of the outer two joints of a child’s little finger. To compensate for flightlessness, it has developed stout and powerful legs, toes and claws that together account for up to a third of its bodyweight. It is a superb runner and fights with flashing razor-sharp claws. Biologically, the kiwi sets several world records. Of all the kiwi’s improbable features, perhaps the most bizarre, for a bird, is its sense of smell. It is renowned for its ‘nose’. It has a well-developed sense of smell because the part of the brain controlling this sense (the olfactory bulb) is much larger than in other birds and rather more like a mammal’s in structure. |
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