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Updated: June 6, 2025
Before the white man came, in fact, the kea was a mild-mannered fruit-eating or honey-sucking bird. But as soon as sheep-stations were established in the island these degenerate parrots began to acquire a distinct taste for raw mutton.
For now the cherries were fast ripening, and the fruit-eating birds, especially the thrushes and black-birds, were inflamed at the gleam of crimson colour among the leaves. In the very large orchards men and boys were stationed all day long yelling and firing off guns to frighten the marauders.
'You could not, says a friend, 'be out at night in a boat, and hear their continual swish, swish, in the water, without believing it. If so, the habit is a quaint change of nature in them; for they belong, I am assured by my friend Professor Newton, not to the insect-eating, but to the fruit-eating family of bats, who, in the West as in the East Indies, may be seen at night hovering round the Mango-trees, and destroying much more fruit than they eat.
Gradually the light increased. Dawn spread her rosy fingers over the pepal fig trees that lined the road; the fruit-eating flying-foxes sought their fragrant nests or roosts, and noiselessly folded their membraneous wings till next time.
After some time all was silent, then suddenly came a loud yell, or scream, uttered probably by some defenceless fruit-eating animal which had been pounced upon by a tiger-cat or the stealthy boa-constrictor. It required the exercise of a considerable amount of nerve to keep up our spirits during those dark hours of the night.
Lord Pabham never advertised the loss of his hyaena; when a strictly fruit-eating animal strayed from his park a year or two previously he was called upon to give compensation in eleven cases of sheep-worrying and practically to re-stock his neighbours' poultry-yards, and an escaped hyaena would have mounted up to something on the scale of a Government grant.
Métivier down to the present time very few Golden Orioles could have visited Guernsey, and still fewer remained to breed; for what with their fruit-eating propensities and their bright plumage, hardly a bird could have escaped being shot and subsequently making its appearance in the bird-stuffers' windows, and affording a subject for a notice in the 'Star, or some other paper.
It was surely, save perhaps for oranges, a more informally and familiarly fruit-eating time, and bushels of peaches in particular, peaches big and peaches small, peaches white and peaches yellow, played a part in life from which they have somehow been deposed; every garden, almost every bush and the very boys' pockets grew them; they were "cut up" and eaten with cream at every meal; domestically "brandied" they figured, the rest of the year, scarce less freely if they were rather a "party dish" it was because they made the party whenever they appeared, and when ice-cream was added, or they were added to it, they formed the highest revel we knew.
It belongs to him, and he may steal it if it cannot be had in any other way. His own juicy flesh craves the juicy flesh of the apple. Sap draws sap. His fruit-eating has little reference to the state of his appetite. Whether he be full of meat or empty of meat, he wants the apple just the same. Before meal or after meal it never comes amiss. The farm-boy munches apples all day long.
Fruit would be necessary for the four hundred and forty-two monkeys, for the plantain-eaters, the fruit-pigeons of the Spice Islands that feed on nutmegs, for the toucans and the flocks of parrots, parroquets, cockatoos, and other fruit-eating birds.
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