The Ghost-Bird.

Yarning to the old sealer and whaler and titi-catching habitants at The Neck, I heard many curious little stories of the Titi Islands, as these dusky petrel-teeming isles are called, and bird-lore and sea-lore.

There is a mysterious bird, they say there, that is never seen but often heard at night. The fowlers are perhaps sitting round the fires that blaze in the open in that solitary place, when there is a sudden swoosh! of great wings, and some unseen creature sweeps past them crying as it goes, “Hákuwai, háAkuwai, u—u!”

That “ooh!” is prolonged until it dies away in the distance in a most eerie note. What bird is that? No one knows. They call it the “hakuwai” from its mournful startling cry. Probably it is one of the large night-roving petrels, but it is a kind of ghost-bird to the Maoris, with its banshee-like eldritch call.