In today’s Story from the Museum Floor, Bryony from the Visitor Team takes a look at the practice of collecting and how it has been responsible for pushing some of the world’s most exotic wild birds to extinction.
For more information on our collections, have a look at our curator’s blogs.
The Variety of Life
One of the most interesting things on display in the Variety of Life case in our Living Worlds gallery is a pair of birds that look similar, but have different beak shapes. These can’t possibly be the same bird, can they?
A pair of New Zealand huia in the Variety of Life case, Living Worlds, Manchester Museum. Note the white tipped tail feathers, and the differing shapes of the beaks.
Well, that’s exactly what people thought when these birds were first discovered, and described as two separate species – usually, when there are species that look similar but have different beak shapes it is an example of adaptive radiation, which I wrote about in my War of the Snails blog post – where one species becomes two by adapting to different niches in the habitat.
Difference and Survival
Looking at birds, this is well illustrated by the example of Darwin’s finches – he originally collected them from the Galapagós Islands, and they were useful to illustrate his theory of evolution because they demonstrate the mechanism of evolution very well. When birds in one area become adapted to getting a certain type of food, those with beaks that make this task easier are better able to survive and pass their genes down, until eventually these are a whole new species compared to those in a different area.
A diagram showing how different species developed into different habitat niches (i.e. beaks suited to different food sources) from one ancestral finch species. (Source)
However, this isn’t the case with the huia. These birds were remarkable in that males and females were much more different than most birds – so different, in fact, that the beak shape didn’t mean that these were different species, they were just different sexes, male and female. This must have meant that they fed in different ways, with the male’s broad beak able to chisel away at rotting wood for insects, and the female’s beak able to probe deeper areas. Some reports suggest they may have even had a co-operative strategy for hunting insects. Sadly, it was not much-studied before its extinction, so we know little about the other factors driving this unique sexual dimorphism (meaning that males and females look different), or even if many of the assumptions made about its lifestyle were even true – now we’ll never know.
A Sacred Bird
The huia was also sacred to the Māori people, and its feathers and skin could only be worn by those of very high rank. It was a great privilege to own a huia feather, and when not in use these feathers were kept in a special box called a ‘waka huia’.
When the Duke and Duchess of York (who became King George V and Queen Mary) visited New Zealand in 1901 and were gifted with some of these feathers for him to put in his hat band, it was a powerful symbolic gesture to the Māori, but back in the UK, it started a craze. Huia feathers soon became the height of fashion. A single feather was worth £1, which is the equivalent of around £100 today. After 1892 it had been made technically illegal to kill the bird, but there was paradoxically no ban on selling the feathers, so we have plenty of evidence to show that the harvest of these birds was ongoing. Six years after the royal visit, the last official sighting of the huia was made.
By 1907, they were officially declared extinct.
An unidentified Māori man wearing huia feathers, in c. 1880s. At this point huia were still plentiful in their traditional areas, and nobody could have suspected that in their lifetimes they would disappear entirely. (source)
Killed in the name of fashion
The fashion for wearing bird plumage in hats was a huge factor in many rapid declines of species; in fact, it was the reason why the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) was formed, here in Manchester. This now million-strong organisation (the largest wildlife conservation charity in Europe) began with Emily Williams and Eliza Philips in 1889, in the area that is now Fletcher Moss Botanical Gardens in Didsbury. Back then, it was called the Plumage League, and the focus on their campaigns was stopping the fashion for wearing unsustainably harvested feathers in hats. The organisation grew, and became the RSPB in 1904.
There were other pressures on the huia too, such as habitat loss and introduced predators, as well as collection for museums – there’s one report of a hunting party obtaining as much as 646 huia skins in a single expedition for export to private collections and museums in 1883 – but it’s very likely that this taste for fashion was the final straw for this beautiful and zoologically unique species.
But how could we have let this happen? Didn’t people feel remorse over killing so many of them?
“While we were looking at and admiring this little picture of bird-life, a pair of Huia, without uttering a sound, appeared in a tree overhead, and as they were caressing each other with their beautiful bills, a charge of No. 6 brought them both to the ground together. The incident was rather touching and I felt almost glad that the shot was not mine, although I was by no means loth to appropriate two fine specimens.”
— Sir Walter Buller, a well-known New Zealand ornithologist of the time, on a trip to collect new taxidermy specimens.
This type of account is surprisingly common, with the cognitive dissonance between an affection for nature and the birds in question, and, of course, the need to ‘catch ‘em all’ by shooting and killing them being very evident. Despite the fact that hunters were some of the first to notice the declines in wildlife numbers and thus establish the first nature reserves (and hunting quotas with restrictions on how many animals one could kill), it is an inescapable fact that they were also the cause of many of the declines in the first place.
This is something that we talk about in our museum displays, such as the Domination case in our Living Worlds gallery, which contains animals mounted and displayed in the typical style of trophy hunters, alongside pictures of hunting parties posed with big game.
The Domination case, Living Worlds, Manchester Museum
The centrepiece of the Domination case (not least because of its size) is the Bengal tiger, prepared by the Van Ingen & Van Ingen Company, who did the majority of tiger mounting for hunters in India in the 20th century. Astonishingly, between 1915 and 1990, they prepared about 20,000 tigers in this way – now considering that there are only about 2,500 Bengal tigers left in the world today you can get an idea of the scale of the operation!
But at least we still have most subspecies of tiger left at present – as for the huia, it is now gone from the New Zealand landscape forever.
Remembered only by the ancestors
We may not have any photos, videos or recordings of live huia the way we did with the thylacine, but one thing we do have are the memories of the Māori people who knew this species the best.
Here is a recording of a Māori elder, Hēnare Hāmana, imitating the huia’s call, from which it gets its name, ‘huia’. He was part of an unsuccessful expedition to find any remaining huia in 1909, two years after it went extinct, and then made this recording recalling the call of the male bird many years later, in 1949:
This Portrait of Rewi Maniapoto, chief of the Ngāti Maniapoto tribe, shows him wearing a pair of huia feathers as a mark of his high status. Listen to Hēnare Hāmana imitating the call of the huia. Sound file from Radio New Zealand Sound Archives Ngā Taonga Kōrero. (source)
It is haunting to hear the echo of a lost species. It is a tragic loss to the world that these beautiful birds are no longer in it, but it’s also a loss to the science of zoology (as the chance to learn more about these birds with their unique adaptation and marvel at their behaviour has now gone) and the Māori culture that loved them the best.
And, as with far too many species, the only place to see them now is in museums such as ours. So next time you visit, do make sure to come and take a look at these beautiful specimens, and maybe just stand and remember them for a time.
Bryony Rigby
Find out more:
Christchirch Library – about the huia
Stories from the Museum Floor 
