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".
His diary notes make it clear that as the expedition was confined to lower South Island, he had not been able to add huia to his shooting list, but had instead, commissioned two brothers living in the Murchison area, to secure for him the pair that figured now in this Victorian case.
Huia were tapu to Māori, sacred, prized above all other birds. Chieftains only were to wear its tail feathers in their hair, and beaks were used as ear pendants. In the Otago Museum is a great treasure, a waka huia, found wrapped in tapa cloth made from the inner bark of lacebark (houhere), wrapped in a piece of finely plaited mat. In the roughly cut, uncarved box, no less than 70 huia feathers were found, such a treasure would have been the property of a tribe or perhaps a group of high chiefs.
Capture of huia could be had by imitating its call to attract the bird down, then with the aid of a long stick, a running knot slipped over its head. J.D. Enys described the subsequent preparation of the skin: "The bird is skinned, leaving both mandibles as well as the wattles attached, but both wings and legs removed. The skin is then stretched by three small sticks, placed one above the other, and stuck on a forked stick inserted in the ground in front of a fire, the inside of the skin is turned towards the fire so as to dry the skin ready for packing; the tail is carefully bent back behind so as not to dirty the white tips of the feathers. When dried, the under sides of the quills of the tail feathers are cut away carefully, so as to render the feathers more flexible.
"A piece of totara bark (Podocarpus totara), about two feet long and five feet wide, is prepared and bent double in the middle, the ends being rounded off. The dried skins with the tail feathers bent back over the back as dried are placed between these thin pieces of bark." Enys, 1875, p. 204
The huia came first to European attention in 1835 when the Rev William Yate recorded the bird in his Account of New Zealand, and soon after, in 1837, the ornithologist John Gould, in A Synopsis of the Birds of Australia and the Adjacent Islands, described and named the bird. Their home was the forests of Remutaka, Tararua, Ruahine and Kaimanawa ranges in the southern half of the North Island, where, according to Buller:
"The huia never leaves the shade of the forest. It moves along the ground, or from tree to tree, with surprising celerity by a series of bounds or jumps. In its flight it never rises, like other birds, above the tree-tops, except in the depth of the woods, when it happens to fly from one high tree to another." Buller, 1888, vol. 1, p. 14
Huia fed on insects and spiders found under bark, in decaying logs, where the male bird's strong beak enabled it to tear away at pieces of bark and to chisel into soft wood to reveal the hiding insects and their larvae. Fruits of porokaiwhiria, pōkākā and karamū might also be taken, Buller has this to say about their feeding:
"But what interested me most of all was the manner in which the birds assisted each other in their search for food, because it appeared to explain the use, in the economy of nature, of the differently formed bills in the two sexes. To divert the birds, I introduced a log of decayed wood infested with the huhu grub. They at once attacked it, carefully probing the softer parts with their bills, and then vigorously assailing them, scooping out the decayed wood till the larva or pupa was visible, when it was carefully drawn from its cell … The very different development of the mandibles in the two sexes enabled them to perform separate offices. The male always attacked the more decayed portions of the wood, chiselling out his prey after the manner of some woodpeckers, while the female probed with her long pliant bill the other cells, where the hardness of the surrounding parts resisted the chisel of her mate. Sometimes I observed the male remove the decayed portion without being able to reach the grub, when the female would at once come to his aid, and accomplish with her long slender bill what he had failed to do. I noticed, however, that the female always appropriated to her own use the morsels thus obtained."
Buller, 1873, p. 66
No paintings exist of huia made from a living bird, and no photographs of the birds are known, (the taxidermist Northover took photographs on at least two occasions, but his prints and negatives were destroyed on his death). But we do have a most remarkable series of three pencil sketches, probably made by Buller's sister-in-law, Laura Mair, at Buller's aviary in Whanganui. They show the male bird, head up calling his mate, in an apparently typical 'resting' position with legs clinging to different small branches, as the bird clings to the trunk of a tree using its tail for support, in the manner of a woodpecker.
I have not been able, in my own paintings of these splendid birds, to bring much that is new to the visual exploration of huia, and I wonder if, with those now iconic illustrations made for Buller, that the great illustrator Keulemans may have had the last word.
* Ray Ching: New Zealand bird paintings (Potton & Burton, $80), is available now. pottonandburton.co.nz