There is a recording out of a very fine song and performance, The Huia and the Magpie, performed by Tāmira Pūoro (Ruby Solly and Michelle Velvin) and Gallery Orchestra, arranged by Seth Boy for taonga pūoro, harp, cello, and vocal duo.[1] New Zealand folklore in the making. On hearing it, a story from the early New Zealand surveyor, artist and Victoria Cross winner, Charles Heaphy, came to mind.

Heaphy arrived from England in Port Nicholson on the New Zealand Company ship the Tory in 1839, along with Dr Ernest Dieffenbach as a New Zealand Company naturalist. Heaphy was employed by the Company as a surveyor, and spent his early years exploring, surveying and sketching early colonial New Zealand (read more). Forty years later, he read a paper to the Wellington Philosophical Society, describing his early time in the Wellington region.

‘The huia (Heteralocha acutirostria) was then to be found in the ranges between Wainuiomata and Palliser Bay. Dr Dieffenbach, the naturalist, was anxious to obtain some, and I accompanied him, making sketches, to the high range that overlooks Palliser Bay. The natives are very fond of the feathers of this handsome, dark, velvety bird, with its yellow wattles and white-tipped tail, and two boys readily went with us as guides. ………We struck in from near Lowry bay, and reached the source of the Orongo stream before night. There was no path whatever. We shot some kakas and snared a kokako, but saw no huias. ….[in the morning] ….on our way homeward, the natives suddenly stopped; they heard in the distance the peculiar cry of the huia. Imitating this, and adding a peculiar croak of their own, which they said was very attractive, our guides soon brought two birds – a male and a female –  within shooting distance. We abstained from firing for a moment, admiring the elegant movements of these birds, as they leapt from tree to tree, peering inquisitively at us, and gradually coming nearer. We now fired with light charges and brough both birds down. The boys were annoyed with our “Griffinism”[2]. They had intended, witht a further allurement of a peculiar guttural croak, to have brought the birds so near as to capture them with a common slip-knot at the end of a stick –  a process which we saw subsequently performed with entire success.’[3]

Through to the early 20^th century the huia declined. Later in the 1860s, that great man of New Zealand birds, Sir Walter Buller kept a pair of huia in his aviary, and was going to send them to the London Zoological gardens, but one was accidentally killed, and the other apparently died soon after in grief.[4] Buller mixed his roles as conservationist, fighting for wildlife reserves such as Little Barrier Island, and a dealer in rare birds, unable to resist  collecting live and dead specimens to send and sell to English collectors. In one instance, instead of placing a pair on Little Barrier Island, where perhaps they might have developed a population, he offered them to the collector Lord Rothschild, suggesting he would accompany them back to England himself.

Towards the end of the 19^th century, it  ‘was open season on huia. Between 1891 and the early 1900s, the Austrian taxidermist Andreas Reischek took 212 pairs as specimens for the Natural History Museum in Vienna, where they are still held today. Buller records that in a single one-month period prior to 1883, a Māori hunting party of 11 men bagged 646 skins between Manawatu and Akitio. Buller’s own labours led to the collection of 18 in the Rimutakas in 1883, a feat he repeated several times during that year: “A pair of huias, without uttering a sound, appeared in a tree overhead, and as they were caressing each other with their beautiful bills, a charge of No.6 [shot] brought both to the ground together. The incident was rather touching, and I felt almost glad that the shot was not mine, although by no means loth to appropriate the two fine specimens.”’[5]

Buller was convinced that the huia was doomed, and he had the same view about Māori, even though the Government banned hunting or killing the bird. As with more recent endangered species such as the takahe and the Chatham Islands robins, positive conservationist action is needed beyond just an order for protection and establishment of sanctuaries. The last huia seen alive were two males and a female in December 28, 1907.⁵

[1] https://ororecordsnz.bandcamp.com/album/huia-and-magpie

[2] A Griffin was a new arrival in colonial India in the 19^th C, and so this usage would refer to  what might be unacceptable behaviour of new settlers and colonists.

[3] Heaphy, C., Notes on Port Nicholson and its Natives in 1839. Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute, Vol VII, pp. 32-39, 11 Oct 1879, (read before the Wellington Philosophical Society by Major Charles Heaphy V.C.)

[4] See Galbreath, Ross: Walter Buller, the reluctant conservationist. Wellington, GP Books, 1989, for Buller’s rather fatal engagements with the huia.

[5] https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/huia-the-sacred-bird/ Accesssed 24 June 2023.