Even so, I freely admit a great liking for its predecessor, the 1966 guide by Bob Falla, Dick Sibson and Graham Turbott. It contains what is almost certainly the most gothic sentence in New Zealand ornithological literature: ‘In 1874 the skin of a freshly dead Australian Darter was found nailed up inside an old shed in Hokitika.’
Before the 1966 guide there was W. R. B. Oliver’s landmark 1930 reference volume New Zealand Birds, revised in 1955. And before that there was Pérrine Moncrieff’s somewhat eccentric but vastly popular New Zealand Birds and How to Identify Them, published in 1925. And before that there was the 1904 guide, The Animals of New Zealand, which is actually almost entirely about birds, co-authored by Captain Frederick Hutton and that stern, emotional Victorian ornithologist James Drummond.
I couldn’t resist. I got the lot, scored in second-hand bookstores, and kept adding. My current bird bibliography weighs in at 37 titles. In part, it was a pursuit of knowledge. Really, though, it was the excitement and greed of discovering a genre of New Zealand writing, a whole new sort of author, a new literature. Inevitably, this led to the one author with whom all New Zealand ornithologists have to deal, have to come to some kind of arrangement. His book is the only real international classic in New Zealand ornithology; his name is like a haunting, the way it bangs and crashes through the ages – that vilified collector of bird skins, Sir Walter Buller.
There is no way you can sidestep Buller’s dark shadow. He was born in the Hokianga in 1838, the son of a Wesleyan missionary. His great published work was A History of the Birds of New Zealand. There were two editions, published in 1873 and 1888. Graham Turbott edited a very handsome edition in 1967; I found a second-hand copy for $150. The original editions cost $7000. In US currency.
In late 2006, I got my hands on the 1888 edition, fetched up from the storeroom of one of the world’s great libraries. It’s quite something. The artwork, by Johann Keulmans, is luscious, and usually accurate; Buller’s field notes on the birds are evidence of close and passionate observation. Or, as Turbott says in the introduction to his 1967 edition, ‘He writes as a naturalist, with keen enjoyment of wild nature and with the naturalist’s sure vision.’ It’s a detailed record of a time and a place, the building of Britain’s far-flung colony, set at a crucial point for native birds as they coped – or didn’t cope – with a reshaped land suddenly crawling with predators such as rats, stoats and pigs, and drastically altered by farms and towns. In short, it’s a priceless historical document – well, yours for only US$7000.
It’s also the most violent book about New Zealand birds ever written. Its pages shake with gunshot. Someone has probably compiled a count of how many birds Buller freely admits to killing. There was the white heron: ‘In the summer of 1859 (after stalking him for two hours) I shot a beautiful adult male.’ Most notoriously, there were his blithely told encounters with huia: ‘He came bounding along, and presented himself at close range. This gave me an opportunity of watching this beautiful bird and marking his noble expression, if I may so express it, before I shot him.’ And, describing an 1883 trip: ‘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 brought both to the ground together.’
The prosecution rests. The huia is now extinct, and Buller is popularly regarded as the bastard who blasted that remarkable forest bird to an early grave. Naturally, he was cast as a whiskered Victorian villain in Nick Blake’s biographical play Dr Buller’s Birds, performed at Circa Theatre, Wellington in 2006. Buller has ‘the blood of the last huia on his hands’. He is facing ‘the dark night of the soul’. He contemplates his sins, his wrongful intervention in the sacred ‘Maori ecology of the land’. What pantomime. What dreary, simple-minded nonsense.
In reality Buller was a complex case. God knows how many huia he took down, but the bird’s fate was decided more by the introduction of predators and the felling of native forest. Buller actually urged the government to establish island sanctuaries for the bird. In 1892 he successfully lobbied for it to be given protected status. And yet the next year he went into the bush and grabbed more specimens for his clients. ‘I was appalled to discover what Buller had done,’ his biographer Ross Galbreath told science writer Rebecca Priestley. ‘He was a real rascal in some ways.’
In some ways… Bird collecting was an established practice in Buller’s era; the question is how far he took it. The cantankerous, gifted naturalist Brian Parkinson has argued that other collectors of the time were more responsible than Buller, although Buller tuts about the ‘zeal’ of his contemporaries, and also dobs in Maori, referring to a party of eleven who hunted huia for a month in the Manawatu Gorge and came back with 646 skins.
In the preface to his 1888 edition, he writes, ‘It has been the author’s desire to collect and place on record a complete life history of these birds before their extirpation should have rendered such a task impossible.’ The previous year, the British naturalist Professor Newton had given an address in Manchester, where he said, ‘I am told by Sir Walter Buller that in New Zealand one may now live for weeks and months without seeing a single example of its indigenous birds.’
At worst, this reads like a kind of wishful
