Stuffed, mounted and captioned Notornis mantelli, this first specimen of takahe was shipped to the British Museum in London. Walter Mantell, who two years earlier found the first takahe bones in Taranaki, happened across the feast and secured the skin. ran with great speed, and upon being captured uttered loud screams, and fought and struggled violently.” Three or four days later they roasted and ate the bird, declaring it delicious. The first recorded European encounter with takahe was in 1849, when a gang of Dusky Bay sealers found and followed the trail of a large and unknown bird. Until-to borrow Mark Twain’s celebrated comment-it was found that the rumours of its death had been “greatly exaggerated.” A flightless grazer the size of a small turkey, it was once the most prized exhibit of this mournful collection. The bird is a takahe, the largest rail in the world. Its feathers look dusty and without sheen, its beak dabbed with red paint to hide a century of fading. Near the egg stands a large bird, its head raised attentively, eyeing the visitor not with fear but with gawkish curiosity. The foreground is of dry tussock, clipped and trampled into a rudimentary nest which shelters a single egg, off-white and splotched with mauve and brown. Yet a poor Te Anau farmer’s exclamation on seeing the exhibit–“Why, them’s the birds we lived on all last winter!”–was just one of many persistent reports of takahe sightings in the early 1900s, all of which were hushed up or dismissed.īetween the laughing owl display and a cabinet with five glass-eyed kakapo, a circular window frames a painted backdrop of snowcapped Fiordland mountains. Last century, mountain skins for museum display was regarded as successful species preservation, and this specimen, which met its end 100 years ago at the mouth of a dog and has since resided in the Otago Museum, was long considered the last of its kind.
The tiny Stephens Island wren, Auckland Islands merganser, New Zealand little bittern, Chatham Islands rail-all defunct. South Island kokako: missing, presumed dead. Huia, with its crescent-moon beak and faded orange wattles: died December 28, 1907. The thumb-sized bush wren: “Slipped away quietly in 1972.” New Zealand quail: “Died in 1869.” The South Island thrush, last seen in 1902. Each has a black-lettered epitaph explaining the time and circumstances of death. There is despair in this pose, the do-or-die abandon of a species making its last stand.Įlsewhere in this Madame Tussaud’s hall of faunal fame lie the less conspicuous and the less renowned-creatures that lacked teeth and claws, or a size that earned them notoriety. What is most striking is its stance: the back arched, the ears flattened, the mouth locked in the freeze-framed snarl of a cornered animal. Another glass cage houses a Tasmanian wolf-ivory-yellow of coat, banded brown across the hindquarters, its rat-like tail an anachronism for a creature that could otherwise pass for a streetwise but famished mongrel. One cabinet, lit in film noir style, preserves the memory of 11 moa, their skeletons wired together from bones discovered in caves and swamps. Here, arranged with the methodical tidiness of a cemetery, is a record of evolution’s casualties: a menagerie of the dead and the has-beens, whose insular world changed faster than they could follow. On the Fourth Floor of Dunedin’s Otago Museum, above the display of ships and ocean voyages, lies a sombre animal mausoleum-a gallery of extinction. Written by Derek Grzelewski Photographed by Rod Morris
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