Culture
Huia today, gone tomorrow
by Rebecca Priestley
New Zealand, a hotspot for extinction, is now a world leader in saving species.
The story of the huia, a poster bird for extinct New Zealand species, has been well told. Last seen in 1907, the beautiful huia, with its black body and distinctive orange wattle, had been collected to death by 19th-century dealers and ornithologists for display in museums and fashionable drawing-rooms – and for its white-tipped tail feathers, which made quite the jaunty hat decoration.
Icon maybe, but the huia has plenty of company – 58 of our bird species, or 26 percent, have become extinct since humans arrived here in the 13th century. To celebrate those species, and to remind us of the continuing threat to many others, Te Papa fossil vertebrates curator Alan Tennyson and wildlife artist Paul Martinson have together made a magnificent book, Extinct Birds of New Zealand.
After an excellent introduction featuring good maps and graphs, the bulk of the book is made up of accounts of the 58 extinct species, including nine species of moa. Even the giant moa, the tallest bird ever known to have lived – outstretched, its neck could reach up to three metres high – was at the mercy of Haast’s eagle. With “claws the size of a tiger’s”, the giant eagle could “crush the moa’s hindquarters and the base of the neck with its powerful feet” and use its elongated beak to rip open the pelvis and reach the tasty kidneys inside.
The moa fell victim to human hunting around AD1400, and Haast’s eagle soon followed, suffering from loss of prey. But many of the smaller species in this book vanished much more recently, succumbing to the appetites of introduced rodents and mus-telids – and human collectors – only in the past 100 years or so.
With its full-page illustrations and descriptions of such recently extinct species as the huia, the North and South Island pio-pio and the laughing owl (whose “laugh” Canterbury naturalist Thomas Potts described as being like an “uncontrollable outburst, the convulsive shout of insanity”), Extinct Birds begs comparison with the most celebrated of New Zealand bird books, Walter Buller’s A History of the Birds of New Zealand, first published in 1873, with illustrations by German natural history artistJ G Keulemans. Many of the species featured in the latter book became extinct in the decades that followed.
Good timing, then, that Random House has just published a collection of Keulemans’s paintings of New Zealand birds. This beautifully produced book features an introduction by science historian Ross Galbreath (who in 1989 wrote Buller’s biography), along with short excerpts from Buller’s landmark book and reproductions of the Keulemans chromolithographs that won the book such acclaim in its 1888 edition.
Though Martinson’s full-page colour illustrations in Extinct Birds are striking and informative, they lack the depth and vibrancy of Keulemans’s 19th-century illustrations, whose charm and character are hard to beat. In fact, though the pocket size of The Art of J G Keulemans: Paintings of the Birds of New Zealand might make it affordable, it’s a shame not to see these wonderful illustrations on a larger scale. But for anyone not lucky enough to have a copy of Buller’s Birds (even second-hand copies of the 1967 edition now cost upwards of $100), this makes a fine alternative.
In Extinct Birds, Tennyson points out that New Zealand, known as a hotspot for species extinction, is also now a world leader in saving species from extinction. That’s one of the themes of Neville Peat’s Kiwi: The People’s Bird. In this, his third book about the national bird, Peat describes the “world’s most unbirdlike bird” as having avoided extinction “only through human intervention at the eleventh hour”.
The kiwi was not just easy prey for introduced mammals. Although Maori took kiwi for food and to make chiefly cloaks out of their prized feathers, hunting was often restricted by local tapu and rahui. When the Europeans arrived, they too hunted kiwi for their meat (although Anglican missionary William Yates described it as “black, sinewy, tough and tasteless”) and collectors sent skins to Europe for scientific study and museum display, and for the fur trade. (Thomas Potts turns up here, too, decrying the demand for kiwi skins “to furnish material for muffs for frivolous women”.)
By the late 19th century some naturalists believed the kiwi was doomed to extinction but, given full legal protection in 1896, the species survived.
The People’s Bird is an appropriate title. Although the book is to some degree everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-the-kiwi, I was particularly interested to read about the kiwi doing battle with the giant native earthworm, which grows to the “thickness of a garden hose”. It is strong on the work of ordinary New Zealanders, showing how much the survival of the national bird has depended on individuals and community groups, as well as agencies – like the Department of Conservation – charged with its protection. But although some kiwi populations are doing very well, the Okarito brown kiwi, or rowi, and the Haast tokoeka are both critically endangered, and other species of kiwi continue to be vulnerable.
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