This programme features a talk by A.P. Harper, who worked for pioneering New Zealand naturalist Charles Douglas. He talks about the scarcity of the weka compared with the abundance he knew in the late-1800s.
The weka was commonly known in Westland as the 'Māori hen' and in Canterbury as the 'wood hen'. It was once common all over Canterbury and Otago, including on the plains near Christchurch. Harper gives a physical description of the bird, and says a really fat weka will provide nearly a pint of oil when boiled. He describes the uses of the weka by bushmen and Māori for food and medicine.
In 1894 Harper explored the Karangarua area near Mt Sefton with a Māori man named Bill, who told him about West Coast Māori exporting weka to the North Island as the North Island variety of the bird was too small, and also that they would only trap the birds in a particular area every two years, to give bird numbers time to recover. They were smoked and then packed into kelp bags for transport, and fetched the equivalent of three shillings each.
The birds used to be boiled for stew and then the oil was skimmed off to be rubbed on boots to soften the leather, or mixed with flour to make a kind of biscuit. Harper describes how Bill taught him the Māori way to cook weka, by inserting red hot stones inside the body and then roasting it over a fire, which cooked it inside and out in about 20 minutes. The bird had a strong flavour, with the legs being the only parts with much meat, but Bill enjoyed the entrails very much as well.
Harper describes the curiosity and fearlessness of the bird, and its defensive mechanisms. He also gives details of several trapping and hunting techniques, which exploited the bird's curiosity. He says the bush use to provide so much food, they did not need to take much with them on expeditions. A weka's leg could also be used as bait to catch eels very effectively.
By 1930, when Harper crossed the Southern Alps from The Hermitage to the West Coast, he only saw four weka, two blue ducks and heard one kiwi. There were no smaller birds left in the bush at all.