Of parrots, Stringops, the kakapo or owl-parrot, is certainly peculiar, while Nestor constitutes a peculiar subfamily of the brush-tongued parrots or Trichoglossidae.
In India the northern range of the group is only bounded by the slopes of the Himalaya, and farther to the eastward parrots are not only abundant over the whole of the Malay Archipelago, as well as Australia and Tasmania, but two very well-defined families are peculiar to New Zealand and its adjacent islands (see Kakapo and Nestor).
The great auk, once common on the British coasts, those of Denmark, the east coast of North America, then restricted to those of Newfoundland, Greenland and Iceland, has been killed by man, and the same fate has overtaken the Labrador duck, the Phillip Island parrot, Nestor productus, and the large cormorant of FIG.
This may be explained by a variety of causes, of which the chief is the maintenance by the Slays down to a very late period of gentile or tribal organization and gentile marriages, a fact vouched for, not only in the pages of the Russian chronicler Nestor, but still more by visible social evidences, the gens later developing into the village community, and the colonization being carried on by large co-ordinated bodies of people.
Nestor, an old monkish chronicler Origin of Kiev, relates that in the middle of the 9th century of the the Slav and Finnish tribes inhabiting the forest region around Lake Ilmen, between Lake Ladoga and the upper waters of the Dnieper, paid tribute to military adventurers from the land of Ras, which is commonly supposed to have been a part of Sweden.