Their nippled upswells, dreamy on sunny days in their delicate wash of hazy blue
- Date of account
- Published 1923
- Source
- Maori folk-tales of the Port Hills, Canterbury, New Zealand
- Reference
- Maori folk-tales of the Port Hills, Canterbury, New Zealand · selected passage 22
- Rights
- public_domain
- Language
- English
- Record updated
- 2026-08-25
Record summary
their nippled upswells, dreamy on sunny days in their delicate wash of hazy blue
Published source text
Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.
Source passage
Source text · mention onlytheir nippled upswells, dreamy on sunny days in their delicate wash of hazy blue. Here near the Stony Bay road saddle, is the legend-haunted O-te-Patatu, the old-time ridge of the fairies and the _titi_. The _titi_ or muttonbird has long since disappeared from the Port and Peninsula hills, but in the Maori days it was plentiful on many such high places. It loved to build on lofty hills, where the soil was soft enough to enable it to make its burrows. There was a cliff at O-te-Patatu, says the _Kaumatua_, where the _titi_ lived and bred in great numbers in the long ago. The Maori tribes who lived on the beaches and on the trenched and parapeted promontories made expeditions to the hilltop in the season when the young birds were fat, and caught, cooked and preserved them in kelp baskets and pottles, just as the Foveaux Strait and Stewart Island Maoris do at the present time. But the _Patu-paiarche_ who lived on the crags of O-te-Patatu and Tara-te-rehu also hunted these _titi_, and slaughtered them in such numbers, in a most unfairylike manner, that presently these fishy petrels became extinct in that locality.
Historical context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyThis material belongs to a folklore tradition. Story type, collector, community, transmission and literary editing matter when comparing it with other sources.
Modern context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyLattice compares motifs and reported features without assuming that a traditional being is a biological species or that similar stories document one external cause.
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