The Owl That Fell from the Sky (7 page)

Willie Cheeseman's reef heron

In 1946 in a gallery at Auckland Museum, Lady Freyberg, wife of the governor general, unveiled a delightful plaque—bronze with inlaid paua shell—designed by an Auckland sculptor, Richard Oliver Gross. She named the gallery the Cheeseman Hall.

Thomas Cheeseman is something of a hero for Auckland Museum's natural history curators. He served as the museum's sole curator for forty-nine years, from his appointment as a young man in 1874 to his death in 1923. He alone was responsible for all collections at the museum until he gained an assistant, Louis Griffin, in 1908. While a strong advocate of the museum's work and a top biologist, he was by all accounts a quiet achiever and a gentleman.

Cheeseman effectively founded Auckland Museum as a professional institution, developing it from a small-town amateur affair to a fully fledged Edwardian museum suited to a small but growing colonial city. In 1867, Frederick Hutton, the museum's honorary curator, had contacted Julius von Haast at Canterbury Museum concerning a possible exchange of specimens. “The Museum here,” he wrote, “is such a wretchedly poor one that it will be impossible for me to send you anything at all equal to the value of your Moa bones for some time to come.” Cheeseman changed all that.

He was primarily a botanist. There was no university in New Zealand when he was young so he taught himself: his
Manual of the New Zealand Flora
, first published in 1906, was one of his greatest botanical accomplishments. He also seemed to handle non-botanical curatorial requirements with ease, presiding over the development of diverse natural history collections and the museum's early acquisitions in what are today world-class collections of Māori and Pacific ethnology.

Under Cheeseman's guidance the bird and mammal collections grew steadily; today many specimens still bear his accurate handwritten labels. He started a numbered register of land vertebrates, which listed for each specimen the registration number, species, date received, place of origin and donor. This “blue book” remains the starting point for the documentation of most of the museum's early specimens. For some entries the date column is simply annotated “In Mus. 1874”, hinting that record-keeping was poor before Cheeseman came on the scene.

He was an energetic correspondent, writing regularly overseas and within New Zealand to arrange large exchanges of specimens which would rapidly develop the museum's collections. New Zealand birds were a popular currency in international exchanges, and Cheeseman needed to acquire surplus specimens. At times he was able to purchase prepared bird skins from collectors or dealers such as W. Hawkins and Sigvard Dannefaerd, who both collected in the Chatham Islands, and William Smyth, a commercial taxidermist in Caversham, Dunedin, but this option was expensive and thus severely limited by the museum's perennially straitened circumstances. Up to 1908, a common refrain in the
Annual Report
was that the museum could not afford to employ a taxidermist.

With necessity the mother of invention, Cheeseman enlisted his own family in a solution to the taxidermy problem. His younger brother William Joseph, a building contractor, was handy with a gun and seems to have had an interest in and aptitude for shooting birds. Over several decades he shot hundreds, with a peak around 1880 when he was in his twenties, and passed them to his brother for the museum.

But how could the birds be processed into stable skins? The Cheeseman men had three sisters, Emma, Ellen and Clara. The family was well off and the sisters were free to fill their days with pursuits such as embroidery, sketching and painting. Emma, the eldest sister, either volunteered or was persuaded to take up taxidermy, which she mastered well, producing tidy study-skins with the legs neatly crossed and the heads of the longest-billed birds turned to one side. To a leg of each bird Thomas Cheeseman tied a label in his neat copperplate writing. Where Willie was the collector, the label was annotated “W. J. C.”. On the backs of many labels, someone else, perhaps Emma herself, wrote “E. C.” in pencil, presumably to note the birds she had prepared.

 

 

Interested in Cheeseman's large international exchanges, I studied the correspondence he carried out with Enrico Giglioli, director of the natural history museum in Florence, Italy. There are fifty-two known letters from at least sixty-three that the men exchanged between 1877 and 1904. These delightfully written letters give a detailed account of the exchanges and the attendant issues and concerns. In time, despite the slow postal service, high cost of freight, need for agents, pillage en route, and delays caused by port strikes and unscheduled transhipment, much was achieved. More than six hundred Italian and foreign birds and other land vertebrates were sent to Auckland, while one hundred and fifty New Zealand birds and numerous Māori and Pacific ethnographic items were sent to Florence. There were also exchanges of pressed plants, insects, and academic periodicals—the bulletin of the Italian Entomological Society was exchanged for
Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute
.

Giglioli had been born in London to an English mother and an Italian father in political exile. After his school years in England, which explain the perfect English of his letters, he had returned to Italy to attend university. He had then signed up as assistant naturalist on a round-the-world voyage of an Italian warship, the
Magenta
. At Hong Kong in 1867 the chief naturalist, Professor Filippo de Filippi, died of cholera, and Giglioli, aged twenty-two, had to take charge of the scientific team.

The
Magenta
voyage has a link to New Zealand, for south of Pitcairn Island the team collected a new species of seabird, which Giglioli and another ornithologist, Tommaso Salvadori, described and named in 1869
Pterodroma magentae
, the Magenta petrel, in honour of the ship. Today it is also known as the Chatham Island taiko. One of the world's rarest birds, it breeds in the forested south-west part of Chatham Island, some 850 kilometres east of mainland New Zealand. The taiko once bred in vast numbers but exploitation by Moriori, the indigenous people of the Chathams group, and by introduced predatory mammals reduced numbers so greatly it was thought to have become extinct. It was rediscovered in 1978 by a determined naturalist, David Crockett, who spent many years searching for it. Photographs and measurements of the bird established that it and the Magenta petrel were the same species.

After his voyage on the
Magenta
, Giglioli obtained employment in Florence, including the directorship of the natural history museum, which he held until his death in 1909. In their nearly three decades of correspondence, he and Cheeseman never met and never proceeded beyond “My Dear Sir” and “Dear Colleague”. However, a few glimmers of their personal lives crept in. Delays in replying often elicited concerned enquiries as to health. Cheeseman had on one occasion been ill, which for a time had “laid me on one side altogether”. Another time severe illness had afflicted Giglioli's wife, who “is now, thank God, well again”. Cheeseman was also late in writing because of his marriage to Rose Keesing in November 1889 and his expedition soon afterwards to the northern Three Kings Islands, on which his wife accompanied him.

In the land vertebrates storeroom in Auckland Museum I viewed the hundreds of surviving animals from the Florence exchanges; many still had original labels in Giglioli's hand. In 2007 I spent three days at the museum in Florence to see the New Zealand birds Giglioli had received in exchange. To reach Museo Zoologico e di Storia Naturale, usually known as La Specola, from my modest hotel near the railway station, I had the pleasure each day of walking across town and over the Ponte Vecchio. La Specola first opened to the public in 1775 and I was expecting a building with a grand facade. On my first day, I walked up and down a section of the narrow street several times before I studied the street numbers and realised I had been passing the small museum entrance.

I was helped by several of the staff. First, I needed a short lesson in Italian vocabulary to understand the field names in the computer catalogue. From the computer I could scan the records of New Zealand birds and find those from the Auckland exchange that I wished to see. I sat in a workroom next to the office where Giglioli once worked. A French door was open to a small balcony—thick with leafy vines—that looked out on the enclosed museum garden.

The bird specimens were brought to me in batches from storage. I particularly wanted to see any rare species, and I also wondered if there were any Cheeseman family birds. There were several: I saw at once that Willie's shooting and Emma's stuffing had helped fuel the Florence exchanges. I particularly remember a nice study-skin of a reef heron, one of New Zealand's native water-birds. Cheeseman's writing on the original label showed it had been collected in Auckland's Orakei Basin on March 4, 1879. The letters “W. J. C.” told me who the collector had been and the preparator was signified by “E. C.” on the reverse.

It was good to see proof that the New Zealand birds had made the journey across the globe. The earliest ones had gone from Auckland by sailing ship, probably the barque
Alastor
. They had then survived the turmoil of one hundred and twenty years of Italian history, during which time fascists came to power and were driven from power and a monarchy gave way to a republic. In August 1944, while the birds sat in the museum's ornithological collection, New Zealand Army units had entered a liberated Florence during the Italian campaign.

On the final afternoon I saw the special galleries for which the museum is famous. They contain innumerable eighteenth-century wax models of human anatomy prepared for medical teaching. The detail and accuracy of these virtual dissections was staggering. After an hour of peering closely at every inch of the human body from inside and out, I needed fresh air. I retreated to the Boboli Gardens next to the museum for some final views of Florence and the rolling Tuscan hillsides, and contemplated the extraordinary and enduring legacy of Thomas Cheeseman.

 

The Duke of Genoa's black-thighed falconet

Among the thousands of study-skins of birds arranged on trays in the cupboards of the land vertebrates storeroom at Auckland Museum there are many foreign birds. Most of these birds, which are exotically shaped and coloured in comparison to the local species, are from exchanges carried out in the late 1800s; the original labels, tied with fine string to the birds' legs, are annotated in the loveliest of handwritings.

It was many years before I began to understand the wealth of history bound up with these old skins. Seven birds are annotated as coming from Malacca in the Malay Peninsula. All have the same simple paper labels, which have been cut from lined sheets. In 2001 I asked an Italian intern at the museum to translate the expression “Da S. A. R. il Duca di Genova” that appeared at the bottom of each label. Of course, it means “From H. R. H. the Duke of Genoa”. I began a correspondence with Carlo Violani at the University of Pavia; Violani had published papers on Italian historical bird collections and was able to give me information on these and other specimens.

Although the birds were from Malacca, it turned out that the skins had been purchased in Singapore in July 1879 by members of an expedition to the Far East on the Italian corvette
Vettor Pisani
. The two-year expedition was led by Prince Tommaso of Savoy, the second Duke of Genoa and nephew of the king of Italy.

Back in Italy, the birds that had been gathered were studied by Tommaso Salvadori, an Italian count, and Enrico Giglioli, the director of the natural history museum in Florence. Together they published an account of them in 1888. When the birds had been studied, some became “duplicates” available for exchange, and Giglioli included these seven in a consignment sent that year to Thomas Cheeseman, curator of Auckland Museum.

One of the Duke of Genoa's bird skins is a black-thighed falconet,
Microhierax fringillarius
. This bird is about the size of a house sparrow, and at a passing glance you could mistake the skin for that of an inoffensive songbird. However, closer inspection shows it is a miniature bird of prey, with the same fearsome hooked beak and talons of its larger relatives. There are several species of falconets and all of them live in, or at the edges of, the forests and woodlands of tropical Asia, where they hunt mostly large insects in the tops of trees and nest in tree holes.

Another Italian explorer-naturalist of the 1870s was Odoardo Beccari. He and a compatriate were the first Europeans to explore the interior of western New Guinea, and Auckland Museum received two Beccari birds from this region, again via Enrico Giglioli. The specimens went first to Museo Civico di Storia Naturale in Genoa, a museum that had been founded in 1867 by Marquis Giacomo Doria, a naturalist. Here they were studied by Salvadori for his three-volume monograph on the ornithology of New Guinea and the Moluccas. From there the two birds went by exchange to Giglioli in Florence, and from him to Auckland. One is a rufous-bellied kookaburra, the other a colourful ground-dwelling forest bird called a red-bellied pitta. Both were collected in 1875.

Like Thomas Cheeseman at Auckland Museum, Odoardo Beccari was principally a botanist, and during explorations in Sumatra in 1878 he discovered the plant for which he is most famous—the titan arum. This rare plant has the largest unbranched flower-cluster in the world: it can stand over three metres tall. Because of its fetid smell, the titan arum is also called the corpse plant. Cheeseman and Beccari met the following year when Beccari visited Auckland. Cheeseman later sent Beccari seeds of New Zealand's nikau palm but the seeds could not be made to germinate in Italy.

In 1879 Auckland Museum got more New Guinea birds, purchasing them from a thirty-nine-year-old Scotsman, Andrew Goldie. A naturalist, explorer and merchant, Goldie was based in New Guinea from 1876 until his death in 1891. He owned Port Moresby's first general store and discovered gold near the settlement in 1878, engendering a small gold rush. Many of the birds that went to Auckland may have been collected by his assistant Carl Hunstein, an albino German, who was later drowned by a tsunami while collecting on the west coast of the New Guinea island of New Britain in 1888.

Another Scotsman, Henry Forbes, in 1885 published
A Naturalist's Wanderings in the Eastern Archipelago
, a detailed and gripping account of his travels in the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia. For part of his intrepid journeying Forbes was accompanied by his new wife Anna, who would publish her own account in 1887 under the title
Insulinde: Experiences of a Naturalist's Wife in the Eastern Archipelago
.

Henry Forbes complained of the hostility and “absurd and petty jealousy” of the Dutch Resident at Amboina, J. G. F. Riedel, who obstructed his travels to certain islands. There had long been ill will between the Dutch and the British over these “Spice Islands” and in addition Riedel was himself a bird collector: Auckland Museum has nine study-skins from the Celebes, today's Sulawesi, which he obtained in 1875. Forbes has a connection with New Zealand: he went on to become the director of Canterbury Museum from 1890 to 1893.

Some nineteenth-century bird collectors were wealthy industrialists. One such was Henry Seebohm, a Sheffield steel magnate, who built a private collection of 20,000 birds between about 1870 and 1895. Seebohm travelled widely to pursue his interest in ornithology: his published books included two on birds of Siberia and one on birds of Japan. Through the Auckland Museum's exchanges with Florence, one of Seebohm's birds found its way to New Zealand—a crow collected in Siberia in May 1877, probably near an encampment where Seebohm and his expedition waited for ice to break up at the confluence of the Yenesei and Kuriaka Rivers.

Another specimen that came via the Florence exchanges was a black kite, a bird of prey that had been collected in 1867 at Amoy (now Xiamen) in China by Robert Swinhoe, British Consul in the city. Swinhoe, a passionate and energetic naturalist, explored large tracts of coastal China, made a couple of inland journeys, and served in several places as diplomat or interpreter, all the while collecting information for accounts, which he later published, of the bird life. While visiting Shanghai in 1873 he was stricken with paralysis in his legs. He struggled on, carried about in wheelbarrows or sedan chairs, but his health deteriorated further and he returned to London. He remained paralysed and died at the age of forty-one.

 

 

Thomas Cheeseman also arranged major exchanges of birds with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. between 1886 and 1892. The hundreds of bird skins the Auckland Museum received are notable for the fullness of their labelling compared with the scant information on the labels of many New Zealand birds collected in the same period. Most of the Smithsonian birds were gathered in the wild west during exploration by the federal government, often carried out by army personnel at frontier outposts. Many of the pre-printed labels carry the names of lengthy expeditions such as “U.S. Northern Boundary Survey 1874” and “Explorations and Surveys West of the 100th Meridian”. Collecting birds in the pristine wilderness was often an antidote to loneliness and boredom.

Among the Smithsonian collectors represented at Auckland are several well-known ornithologists of the day. Robert Ridgway was the first full-time curator of birds at the Smithsonian. Charles Bendire joined the United States Army at the age of eighteen, fought in the American Civil War, and in 1890 was promoted “for gallant service in action against Indians at Canyon Creek, Montana, in 1877”. He spent around twenty years in the western territories collecting birds and their eggs. Some of his study-skins at Auckland Museum came from military outposts such as Fort Custer and Fort Klamath. He once climbed twelve metres up a tree to collect a hawk egg, and carried it safely in his mouth when he had to descend hurriedly to escape a band of Apaches.

Elliott Coues was a surgeon in the United States Army and a founding member of the American Ornithologists' Union who pioneered the use of the subspecies concept for regional populations of birds, each distinguished by three-part names. Henry Henshaw collected more than 13,000 bird specimens in North America. Coues and Henshaw are reported to have once raced each other, and found each could prepare a sparrow study-skin in under two minutes. This would have been quite a feat: the fastest skinning that I have seen was by a museum preparator in Australia, who worked fast and furious to produce a magpie skin in under thirty minutes.

Another Smithsonian collector, Edward Nelson, is said to have alleviated the climatic hardships he endured during trips in western Alaska by paying Eskimo women to sleep in his wet clothes so the garments would be dry by morning.

There were also great dangers. Robert Shufeldt, an American scholar who published an article in 1918 on the osteology, or bone structure, of New Zealand's alpine parrot the kea, drowned in the Ohio River near his home. In the Dakotas in 1864, Sergeant John Feilner galloped ahead of his column in his eagerness to collect birds; while dismounted at a stream he was surprised by Sioux warriors and killed. Bird skins from both men are in Auckland Museum.

The most famous collector of the Smithsonian birds sent to Auckland was Theodore Roosevelt, whose name inspired the teddy bear. In his younger days the future president was a keen hunter and shooter who built up a collection of study-skins of local birds. Later in life he became a pioneering conservationist. As governor of New York he closed down hat factories that used bird feathers. During his presidential term from 1901 to 1909 he achieved more for wildlife protection than any previous president, creating numerous national parks and reserves. He gave his bird collection to the Smithsonian, and nine duplicate specimens came to Auckland Museum as exchanges.

 

 

Old specimens in natural history museums, provided they have been carefully documented and faithfully numbered and labelled, tell many such stories—not just of bygone days and remote and exotic places, but of the passion of the collectors and the troubles they endured to bring or send the specimens home. Today, museums get fewer of their birds from intrepid expeditions. Many specimens are salvaged from accidental bird deaths. Members of the public play a critical role by offering museums dead birds they find crashed into windows, lying on the roadside, or washed up on beaches. Bird curators often keep in touch with field officers, post-graduate biology students, bird-rescue volunteers, and other people who show an understanding of the value of museum collections and take great trouble to collect and label any dead birds they find during their work. For every new specimen received, we record the collector's name: even seemingly ordinary specimens may be of great interest to future generations because of the identity of their collectors.

In the early 1970s Auckland Museum received three wading birds from the Delaware Museum of Natural History. When you look at these birds they seem very drab and pedestrian—until you discover they were collected in the 1950s by John Eleuthère du Pont, a member of the American industrial family. Du Pont, an ornithologist whose interests included South Pacific birds, founded the museum in 1957 and directed it for several years. He described a new subspecies of parrot-finch from Western Samoa, and in 1976 published a guide to South Pacific birds, beautifully illustrated by George Sandström.

Du Pont was also a stamp collector and apparently paid nearly a million dollars in 1980 for the unique 1856 British Guiana one cent black-on-magenta, perhaps the world's most famous postage stamp. In his private life he displayed increasingly bizarre behaviour. A major supporter of wrestling, with dreams of personal glory, on January 26, 1996 he shot and killed David Schultz, the 1984 Olympic wrestling champion who lived on his estate in Philadelphia. Convicted of third-degree murder, du Pont died in prison in 2010.