Tales of Birds

Forest and Bird, Issue 306, 1 November 2002, Page 32

Tales

of Birds

BRIAN GILL

— BRIAN GILL

finds

pird specimens In museums tell stories of pioneer discoveries

uckland Museum began collecting birds in the 1850s. Now, a century and a half later, its bird collection of 12,000 specimens tells a fascinating story through the lives of the collectors and the lengths they went to obtain birds. It is a story of remote places, and the tenacity of the people who collected birds, prepared them and packed them for carriage home. The museum’s 2500 foreign birds tell an exotic story of danger and hardship in the tropics and in the American "Wild West’. For the last 50 years, birds have come to the museum by salvage from those that have died naturally. For the first 100 years, however, birds were mostly killed deliberately for the museum Viewed with horror by today’s naturelovers, this collecting must be weighed against the on-going value of the specimens for scholarly research and public display. In Auckland Museum’s current ‘Origins’ gallery, a mounted South Island saddleback still performs its educational role about 120 years after Andreas Reischek shot and prepared it. The number of bird specimens needs

context. A few thousand collected in a hundred years is negligible beside the estimated two million birds per day killed around the world by domestic cats and motor vehicles. While others battle to save our species in the wild, museums struggle to preserve representative samples of our birds as a resource for future educational displays and research.

New Zealand birds

A sxe Museum’s oldest surviving New Zealand stuffed birds were bought around 1856 from the collector and taxidermist Mr I. St John of Nelson. St John must have been one of the few taxidermists in the young colony, and his birds were desperately needed by the new museum, which at that stage occupied two rooms in a farm cottage on a site that is now part of the Auckland University city campus. From initial consignments of more than 40 birds, five or six have survived to the present. In New Zealand of the 1850s, even putting a name to birds was a problem. One of St John’s birds was listed as a ‘Mud

Sucker, presumably some sort of wader. In 1856 the honorary curator complained to St John ".. will you be kind enough next time to put the names on the stands. A Black & White Bird with Red Bill I received this time I had one from you before so do not send up another .... The red-billed bird was presumably an oystercatcher. While St John was in Nelson in the winter of 1856 he was among the first in New Zealand to see Australian silvereyes. The specimen he sent to Auckland Museum, sadly now lost, was later cited in

the writings of Sir Walter Buller. Today the self-introduced silvereye is one of our commonest garden birds. In 1878, Thomas Bell, with his wife Frederica and young children, had

themselves put ashore on the uninhabited and unclaimed Sunday (Raoul) Island in the Kermadec group, east of Norfolk Island. In their attempt to settle they faced loneliness, drought, storms, robbery, food shortages, and plagues of rats. They clung on until 1914, by which time their children had increased to 10. Bell visited Auckland occasionally, and from 1888 to 1890 he sent bird skins and eggs to Auckland Museum. Roy Bell, one of the children born on the island, sold 103 bird skins from the Kermadec Islands to the museum in 1911, and later lived on Norfolk Island from where he provided further specimens. J.C. McLean (1871-1918) managed the family’s large sheep station in inland Poverty Bay. Betweeri farm work he found time for nature photography and natural history observations. McLean joined Herbert Guthrie-Smith, a fellow

run-holder, on ornithological expeditions. The latter described his friend’s imperturbable temper. On a trip to Stewart Island in 1911, waist deep in water chilled with melted hail, and with a rising river to swim, McLean was still able to confirm a pair of kokako

in the flooded scrub. Guthrie-Smith noted: ‘I acknowledge he beat me there. If I had seen a Moa I should have let it pass ... Tragically, McLean drowned attempting to cross a flooded river near his home. His important collection of birds’ eggs was presented to Auckland Museum in the 1930s. Another important New Zealand eggcollector was Major Geoffrey Buddle (1887-1951), who built a large collection between the 1900s and the 1940s, obtaining many rare items during travels to out-of-the-way places. Because the eggs were carefully numbered and documented they are now an asset to the

Auckland Museum reference collection. Like McLean, Buddle was a pioneering New Zealand nature photographer as well as a collector.

Antarctic birds

le the summer of 1929-30, and again the following summer, Robert Falla (1901-1979) served as assistant zoologist on Sir Douglas Mawson’s British, Australian and New Zealand Antarctic Research (B.A.N.Z.A.R.) .. Expedition, with | responsibility for W bird studies. He had been honorary ornithologist at Auckland Museum, and this position was made permanent after Falla’s Antarctic work. Falla brought to the museum the large collection of B.A.N.Z.A.R. birds, which were obtained under difficult conditions, and which, because of their precise documentation,

are important scientifically. The B.A.N.Z.A.R. Expedition used the ship Discovery that had served one of Robert Falcon Scott’s expeditions 30 years before. Besides zoological studies, the expedition surveyed a section of the Antarctic coast and conducted the formalities to proclaim the Australian Antarctic Territory. On Kerguelen Island, Falla took a chick from a sheathbill’s nest and placed it in a cardboard box. The parent sheathbills, birds related to gulls, followed him on foot, and while Falla was investigating a petrel burrow they dragged the box away and the.chick escaped. But the chick was needed for the collection and Falla retrieved it, science prevailing over sentiment. Through his lectures, radio talks and popular writing, Sir Robert Falla became perhaps New Zealand’s best-known ornithologist.

Pacific birds

ineteenth-century missionaries in faraway places often found diversion in natural history. The

Wesleyan missionary the Rev. George Brown worked in Samoa and the Bismarck Archipelago, east of New Guinea. Auckland Museum purchased 100 of his bird skins in 1876. A similar collection was bought in 1879 from Andrew Goldie, a 39-year-old Scotsman living in New Guinea. Goldie discovered gold on the Goldie River near Port Moresby in 1878, which led to a small gold rush. He owned Port Moresby’s first general store. Many of his birds may have been collected by an assistant called Carl Hunstein, an albino German, who in 1888 was drowned by a tidal wave while collecting on the west coast of New Britain. G.C. Munro, author of the book Birds of Hawaii (1944), had family links to New Zealand. A collection of his Hawaiian birds, the oldest of them from the 1880s, was presented to Auckland Museum. Among them is a specimen of the Kauai O’o (Moho braccatus), a species of honeyeater recently declared extinct. Munro collected it on the island of Kauai in January 1893. The loss of this species is tragic, but thanks to Munro’s effort in

skinning, preserving, transporting and storing the bird, an additional museum specimen exists for posterity. This species succumbed to habitat clearance and the all-pervasive and unrelenting pressure from introduced mammalian predators, not to the actions of bird collectors. The wealthy philanthropist Mr H.P. Whitney was persuaded by a Trustee of the American Museum of Natural History in New York to fund a lengthy collecting expedition by boat through the South Pacific. The Whitney South Sea Expedition ran from 1920 to 1932, concentrating on birds. When the party called at Western Samoa in 1923 and 1924, the New Zealand Government, the colonial power at the time, made the collecting permit conditional on the presentation of named examples of Samoan birds. New Zealand officials lodged 47 such birds at Auckland Museum, all beautifully prepared and fully labelled by Rollo Beck, the chief collector. A.T. Pycroft (1875-1971) was an enthusiastic amateur naturalist who wrote a nature column for the Auckland

Star from 1927 to 1936. In 1932, while staying on the island of Malaita in the Solomon Islands, he made a collection of birds that now contributes to Auckland Museum’s important Pacific Islands collection. As a young man, Pycroft had the distinction of having eaten a huia. Skilled in taxidermy, he had been sent a huia for mounting. After skinning it he handed its body to his landlady and had her cook it. While sorting Pacific birds my eye was drawn to skins from the Solomon Islands that were exquisitely prepared. All were collected by J.E. Green, who had been on active service with the U.S. Army on Guadalcanal during World War Two. He had been a preparator at a Californian museum, and so, amid the horrors of the jungle war, he had collected and prepared birds as a path to sanity. During rest and recreation in Auckland he presented his birds to Auckland Museum. A young sailor in the Royal New

Zealand Navy also collected birds while on war-time service in the Solomons and gave them to Auckland Museum. Peter Bull went on to a long career as an ecologist in the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research.

North American birds

Bee about 1875 and 1905, Auckland Museum’s Curator, Thomas Cheeseman, arranged major exchanges of bird specimens with museums and collectors around the world. Of special interest were exchanges with the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. The hundreds of bird skins received were fully labelled. Many were collected in the ‘Wild West’ during a time of Federal Government exploration, often by army personnel at frontier outposts. Many labels carry the names of lengthy expeditions, such as the ‘U.S. Northern Boundary Survey 1874’ and ‘Explorations and Surveys West of the 100th Meridian’ Ornithological collecting in the pristine wilderness was often an antidote to loneliness and boredom. Of the Smithsonian collectors represented among the Auckland Museum birds are several well-known ornithologists of the day, like Elliott Coues (a U.S. Army surgeon) and Henry Henshaw. These two once raced each other, and found that each could prepare a sparrow skin in under two minutes. With frivolity there also came danger. Robert Shufeldt (a scholar who published on the osteology of the kea) drowned in the Ohio River near his home, and Charles McKay drowned in Alaska. In the Dakotas in 1864, Sergeant John Feilner galloped ahead of his column in his eagerness to collect, and while dismounted at a stream was surprised by Sioux warriors and killed. Edward Nelson endured climatic hardship in western Alaska, alleviated

somewhat whenever he paid Eskimo women to sleep in his wet clothes so the garments would be dry by morning! Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt (18581919), who inspired the teddy bear, was a hunter, collector and conservationist. He gave his bird specimens to the Smithsonian, which is how nine of them came to Auckland Museum. As Governor of New York he closed down factories that used bird feathers in the fashion trade. During his presidential term (1901-9) he achieved more for wildlife protection than any previous president, creating numerous national parks and reserves. Today museums receive a steady stream of birds, mostly those that have crashed into windows or been found dead by the roadside, and we always record the collector. There are regular collectors who understand the importance of bird collections and take trouble to save and label specimens for us. So the collecting goes on, and one day these birds too may tell a story to future generations through the names of their collectors.

is Curator of Birds at Auckland War

Memorial Museum. He has written several books including New Zealand’s Extinct Birds (Random Century, 1991) and New Zealand’s Unique Birds (Reed, 1999).