In an edited extract from a new book of his work, artist Ray Ching tells of his study of the huia,
Heteralocha acutirostris
The nearest that I have come to this beautiful and fabled bird was listening to the elderly taxidermist Charles Poynter remembering for me his encounters with living huia, half a century earlier, in a fern tree gully, just a few miles from where we were sat in his workshop on the waterfront at Petone. It was the early 1960s, his workshop wasn't in use now, but the taxidermist had kept many of the birds he had worked on over the years in the drawers of collector cabinets and safely out of light so as not to fade their fragile colours. There were weka and pūkeko, white-faced heron, banded rail and bittern, gannets, gulls and stilts and, less familiar to me, a series of 11 Chatham Island snipe (now in collection at Auckland War Memorial Museum) and a study skin of a fernbird.
And then there were the 10 carefully prepared huia, four pairs and two further male birds, one of which was described by Phillipps, 1963, in The Book of the Huia as being "exceptional in the beauty of the greenish-blue colouring … with the original sheen still present". The birds had been shot or caught in the early part of the century by William Northover, a taxidermist also from Petone and after his death, came into the possession of Poynter. A further five or six birds that had been skinned in the bush at the time they were taken and stuffed with mosses and lichen had deteriorated over the years so badly that Poynter was able to save only the heads and some of the tail feathers from one pair, and just the skulls of three others, including a very old, long-billed female bird, were all that could be kept.
That same year, I called on George Elliot, a Nelson taxidermist then in his 80s and who, when I arrived one rainy day, I found out in the backyard, energetically skinning a very large penguin held in a vice. He told me how, early in the century, while apprenticed to the taxidermist W. Martin, he had mounted huia, perhaps as many as 20, and these, he had always thought, were delivered in fresh condition to Martin's Nelson shop. Elliot had, in later years, bought back a number of these birds, for all had been prepared for local people, and he was able to let me have a handsome pair, the male, a young bird with under-tail coverts fringed white, he thought he could remember mounting for the Baigent family at Tākaka. Elliot had since been told that huia were never in South Island, that their southerly range ended at Wellington, but he remained convinced that the birds he prepared had originated south of Nelson, somewhere in the Murchison area, he thought.
Some years later at a natural history sale at Sotheby's in London, I happened on a very large case of New Zealand birds that did contain a most interesting pair of huia. Some thirty or more birds were included and the case came with page notes from the shooting diaries of a Colonel Sir Ralph Stephenson-Clarke, who had come to New Zealand on a collecting expedition in 1885 and had noted each and every bird that fell to his shotgun; he "brought down a kākā with one barrel and a parakeet with it".
