“I’ve never seen any in my 20-year career and I’m not sure that I’ll ever handle another pair.”
Anna says the chance to do so is very special but doubts she will ever see another unless she’s visiting a museum.
In the last two or three years, there have been a small number of auctions with lots that feature taxidermied huia, or their feathers, fetching very high prices.
Anna believes that part of the fact that there seem to have been more of them popping up is due to the auction industry or the market.
“When something rare appears, people get very excited.”
Rather similar to when something turns up on TV programme Antiques Roadshow, she says, where she’ll get phone calls the next day from people saying they have the same item.
“They haven’t, but they think they might have, because suddenly there’s an awareness.”
Huia, native to the North Island, were considered unique, not just for their look, but because they were sacred to Māori who would wear the tail feathers as a mark of their status.
The feathers were also gifted or traded between iwi and were also given to non-Māori as a sign of respect.
But with European settlement of the area, particularly around what came to be known as Seventy-Mile Bush, deforestation for farming and collectors hunting the birds, the numbers declined, with the last recorded sighting being in 1907.
In 2023, a pair of huia birds broke auction records after being bought for £220,000 ($469,304) at a British auction, which had sparked calls for the New Zealand Government to step in and repatriate the birds.
Dame Naida Glavish said she believed the English whānau who were selling the huia should do the right thing and gift them back to New Zealand.
“It actually should be given back because that taonga belongs to all of Aotearoa,” she said.
In May this year, a single huia tail feather sold for $46,521 at Webb’s Auction House in New Zealand, breaking the previous world record by 450% and reportedly making it the world’s most expensive feather.
Huia specimens are incredibly rare and hard to come by, particularly displays showcasing a male and female together.
Anna Evans says the pair going up for auction in London have been privately owned for generations, but she doesn’t know how they came to be in the family’s possession.
She says taxidermy became very popular during the late 19th century.
“It was part of a bigger sort of self-improvement educational aspect of their society.
“They wanted to learn about the natural world.”
Huia were considered “incredibly exotic” to people in that era and so there was a trade for taxidermy.
“Britain [was] very much placed to be at the forefront of that with all its colonial links.”
The hope is that the auction house will get some interest from people in New Zealand, particularly for their cultural and spiritual value, and perhaps be able to be returned home.
“That would be a lovely conclusion,” Anna says.
