The Extinction of the Huia: Birds, Museums and Global Commodification
- Rosa Dyer
- Mar 16
- 7 min read
Welcome to a new Animal Highlights series, where we are exploring relationships between animals, collecting and museums. A lot of this series is based on my doctoral research, which explores bird and human stories through feathered objects in museum collections. By focusing on objects in natural history and world culture museums throughout this series, Claudia and I will think about how certain animals, their bodies and afterlives have been collected, catalogued and encased for the viewing pleasure of museum audiences.
Object Showcase: A Huia Ear Ornament
The inspiration for this first Animal Highlight is an object on display in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, UK. It is a flattened bird skin ear ornament, with distinctive black and white tail feathers. It comes from the Maori culture and was collected sometime before 1887, when it entered the Pitt Rivers Museum collection.
I admit I only noticed this object by chance one day whilst walking around the museum with a friend - my focus is on South American objects, so I usually breeze past the cabinet it was in, but one day it caught my attention. The label accompanying the object in the museum is, like most of the labels in the Pitt Rivers, pretty sparce in its information, but it does describe the skin as coming from a Huia, a bird I had never heard of before. In classic PhD productive procrastination mode, I of course ended up going down quite a research tangent trying to learn about who this bird was – the result is this Animal Highlight episode, alongside a humbling realisation about my lack of knowledge of birds beyond South America!
The Huia (Heteralocha acutirostris)
Endemic to Aotearoa New Zealand, the Huia or Heteralocha acutirostris was an attractive medium-sized bird with black glossy wings and a distinctive white tip to their tail feathers. They had bright orange fleshy lobes or wattles on the sides of their beaks, and a distinctive bill shape which was considered unique among birds, a feature which contributed significantly to their interest among collectors. Part of the bird family Callaeidae, which is endemic to New Zealand, they were songbirds who mostly dwelled close to the forest floor, hopping along the ground and lower forest foliage, where they foraged for insects and fruits.
The Huia held, and continues to hold, an important cultural significance for the Māori people. Due to their scarcity, distinctive behaviour and striking plumage, the Huia and their feathers were highly prized and their black and white tail feathers were often worn by political and religious leaders in the Māori community. These feathers would have been acquired through traditional hunting techniques.The common name “Huia” is most likely onomatopoeic, coming from the loud, whistling call the bird made in the forest. Māori hunters would mimic this call to lure the naturally curious birds towards them, before snaring them in traps in order to kill them.
Once hunted, the Huia would be skinned and their legs and wings removed. In some cases, their skin was then stretched and dried over a fire and used to make ornaments like one which can be found as part of the featherwork displays at the Pitt Rivers Museum which was collected in 1887. In other cases, just the 12 black and white tail feathers would be kept, but both would likely have been worn by an important person in the Māori community as a symbol of power and nobility.
Sexual Dimorphism and Collecting Frenzies
The Huia was first described scientifically by John Gould in 1837, and quickly garnered attention from naturalists due to the bird’s extraordinary sexually dimorphic bill shapes. While male Huia had short, straight bills, the females were much longer and curved (meaning the bird in the Pitt Rivers Museum was a male, we can see its short bill is still intact on the object). This difference in bill shape initially prompted Gould to describe them as two separate species. Working in mated pairs, the Huia used their different beaks to cooperatively find food: the male would pierce holes in the side of rotting wood with his sharp, dagger-like bill and the female would then use her long curved-bill to scoop out grubs.
In many ways, tragically, it was the bird’s unique bill and the attention this feature attracted from naturalists, which led to its decline. Collectors from overseas soon became obsessed with obtaining specimens to showcase this unique characteristic in both museums and private collections and hundreds of birds were killed and shipped abroad. In order to showcase what was perceived as their most intriguing feature, specimens often required collection in pairs and both male and female specimens were typically displayed in taxidermies and dioramas. Many of these can still be seen on display in natural history museums today.
There was a sense in this collecting frenzy of a kind of inevitability to the Huia’s extinction, a theme found common in the history of colonial expansion. Collectors felt it was of utmost importance to acquire Huia specimens, before it was too late. One famous naturalists Walter Lawry Buller notes in his influential 1873 book The Birds of New Zealand: “it has been the author’s desire to collect and place on record a complete life-history of these birds before their final extirpation shall have rendered such a task impossible.”
Despite an awareness of this decline of the Huia, the priority of these naturalists was singularly on extracting Huia bodies for their collections, rather than acknowledging or addressing the reasons for their decline through the implementation of conservation strategies.
Victorian Feather Fashion Trends & Ecological Decline
In addition to the forces of scientific and museum specimen collecting, European fashion trends also contributed to the Huia’s demise. On a visit to New Zealand in 1901, George V, the then Duke of York was presented with a black and white huia tail feather by a Māori spiritual leader, which was placed in the headband of his hat as a sign of respect. Photos of the Duke and his befeathered hat were circulated back in England, where at the time a craze for adorning oneself with feathers, stuffed birds and other natural history specimens was in its height. Huia feathers and beaks became part of this trend, often being used in hats and as part of accessories like broaches. A frenzy for collecting birds as both natural history specimens and raw materials for the fashion industry led to increasing pressures on the Huia population, and by the beginning of the 20th century, their numbers were dwindling.
The Huia also faced internal pressures within New Zealand, as during the 19th century their lowland forest habitats were destroyed to make way for the expansion of pasture land. The Huia was a deeply important bird to Indigenous communities in New Zealand and many communities noticed the decline in the bird's numbers and took action to try to change this. In the late 1800s a number of Māori groups placed a tapu on large areas of the Huia’s remaining habitat, forbidding hunting Huia in these areas for large periods of the year, a practice which had previously been established before colonial settlement. The calls of the Māori had an effect on the New Zealand government, and in 1892 the Huia was included as part of the Wild Birds Protection Act . Plans were put in place to set up sanctuaries to protect the bird, however action was not taken quickly enough and the sanctuaries were never stocked.
Legacy
The last sighting of Huia was recorded in 1907 and the bird is now considered extinct by IUCN. Their feathers still hold a high market value, with a single feather being sold for $8000 NZD in 2010, making it the most expensive feather ever sold at auction. The Huia remain a taonga (a sacred treasure) for the indigenous peoples of New Zealand, who still work to keep the spirits of the birds alive by treasuring the Huia feathers which still survive within communities and remembering and imitating their songs. A hauntingly beautiful recording by Henare Hāmana was made in 1949, 42 years after the last recorded sighting of the Huia, in it he imitated the call of the bird, as he remembers it as a child. You can listen to it here.
Some final thoughts…
It is clear that it was a number of complex historical and socio- ecological forces which led to the extinction of this species, global forces of consumerism, capitalism and ecological colonialism. Specifically highlighting the extractive perspective of Euroamerican naturalists and collectors is important. In many ways we see two ecological knowledge systems here responding to the Huia in vastly different ways. Whilst both the Māori and the colonial settlers engaged in practices of hunting and killing Huia, their relationship to the birds and their habitats was starkly different. Scientists from Europe felt a sense of ownership, as part of this ethos of collecting and possessing the world on which imperialism is based, separating the Huia from its natural life and habitat, while also severing the cultural and spiritual connections it had to Indigenous communities. The Māori on the other hand, also had a tradition of hunting the bird, but used the intimate knowledge of its habitat and life habits to recognise its decline, and tried to implement traditional forms of ecological stewardship to pioneer its protection, alas without much effect.
Further reading:
Warren, J.L., 2018. Huia Echoes. Future remains: a cabinet of curiosities for the Anthropocene edited by Gregg Mit, p.71
Johnston, S. (2020) 'Te Karanga a te Huia | The Call of the Huia', Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision. Published online.
Ruka, J. (2017) Huia come Home. Huia Ministries. New Zealand
Rosa Dyer is a Collaborative Doctoral Project PhD candidate at Birkbeck College University of London and the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. Her practice-based project at the Pitt Rivers Museum focuses on featherwork collections made by South American Indigenous peoples. Her work aims to reveal the dynamic relations that exist between birds, people and environments by working with Indigenous collaborators to reimagine how the feathered objects are represented in the museum. You can connect with Rosa via Twitter (@rosajdyer).
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