The Unburnt Egg Read online

  Building natural history collections is a slow process. Small, steady additions make for a series of specimens that are distributed historically as well as spread geographically. After more than a century of natural history collecting by New Zealand museums, researchers are in a good position to study changes in organisms over time.

  An example is the study-skins of the sacred kingfisher, Todiramphus sanctus. This is a common bird in New Zealand, and Auckland Museum now has seventy-six studyskins, most from the northern half of the North Island. The museums in Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin also have specimens, and these are mostly from their own regions, so the collections complement each other. To study kingfishers across the whole country a researcher needs to visit all four collections, and it is a safeguard against calamity that the nation's bird collections are distributed in this way. The same species of kingfisher occurs in Australia and nearby regions, and Auckland Museum's collection has five foreign skins, a useful reference point for New Zealanders considering geographic variations in this bird.

  Four of the local kingfishers were collected in Auckland suburbs in 1878, 1884 and 1897. Not all were shot—on one label the collector is recorded as “The Cat”. There are no specimens from the 1920s, but every other decade of the twentieth century is represented by between three and fourteen birds. Since the 1950s, Auckland Museum's bird specimens have been prepared from birds found dead and handed in by members of the public. Flying into window glass, striking cars or being killed by domestic cats have been the main causes of death. Five kingfisher study-skins were added in the first decade of this century.

  By preserving such natural history specimens, museums often save researchers the time and expense of collecting their own samples in the field. The aggregation of specimens into public natural history museums is a convenience for researchers that often translates into savings in taxpayer funding. Access to museum specimens is enhanced by electronic versions of museum collection catalogues, increasingly available to be searched online from personal devices anywhere in the world. The maintenance and storage of the collections is inexpensive, given the big picture of the long-term benefits and cost-savings.

  A recent example of the benefit of museum specimens to researchers and to taxpayers involved two biologists from Otago University, Lisa Tracy and Ian Jamieson, who in 2011 published in the journal Conservation Genetics a paper about an endangered New Zealand bird called the yellowhead. The few remaining scattered yellowhead populations show some distinct genetic differences. Tracy and Jamieson compared DNA from contemporary yellowhead blood samples with DNA extracted from tiny slivers of tissue from the toe pads of museum specimens. At three New Zealand museums, and seven museums in Australia, Britain, Canada, the United States and Austria, there were a total of sixty old yellowhead specimens, many from places where the species is no longer found. Auckland Museum contributed eight of the specimens.

  The museum DNA established that the original, widely distributed populations of yellowheads lacked significant regional genetic differences. The genetic variation seen today must be a random effect of the severely reduced populations. This is a pleasing result because it means that in moving yellowheads to predator-free locations to try to save them from extinction, the Department of Conservation does not need to save all the surviving sub-populations, nor keep them separate in an attempt to preserve their genetic diversity. The birds from any source can be mixed, making the task easier and cheaper and saving taxpayer money.

  This is all by way of introduction. What follows is a collection of stories about various natural history specimens that I came to know, and the history, people and science that lie behind them.

  A hapless king penguin

  On June 10, 1885, Charles Francis Adams, a young American taxidermist who had moved to Auckland five months earlier to work at the museum, was woken about midnight by noises in his boarding house. “I looked out of my window and saw the air full of sparks of fire,” he wrote next day.

  He dressed quickly and stepped into the hallway. People were hurrying out with their furniture. This “served as a hint for me to move my effects”. He helped move Mrs Murray's furniture. Poor Miss Sampson “was so terrified that she is partially paralyzed as a consequence”. The fire was put out before it reached Adams' part of the wooden building but he wanted to sleep elsewhere. Knocking at the door of another boarding house but getting no answer, he walked to the museum. There, presumably in his basement taxidermy workshop, he “built a fire and lay on [his] blankets on the floor beside it”.

  These charming details are in a daily diary that Adams kept of the first six months of his employment at Auckland Museum. The diary gives an insight into the working life of a Victorian taxidermist in New Zealand and helps to document the early years of the museum. Founded in 1852, it occupied its first purpose-built building in 1876. This was in Princes Street, close to the centre of town, on a site now occupied by a high-rise hotel. It comprised a main exhibition hall at street level with a mezzanine gallery above. Besides Adams and the curator, Thomas Cheeseman, the only other employees were an attendant employed on Sundays and a janitor. Adams worked from Monday to Friday and on Saturday mornings; his salary was £200 a year.

  I discovered his diary—or rather a brief catalogue entry for it—in the library of the University of Illinois at Urbana quite by accident in 2011, while I was trying to understand the workings of internet searches by half-heartedly entering names of interest. I found the library's website and looked for the email address of a librarian. I was greatly helped by John Hoffmann, who answered my request.

  In 1974 the descendants of Charles Adams' family had offered the diary for photocopying by the university, which was in the nearest city to the farm where Adams had grown up. John Hoffmann posted me a copy of the original photocopy so I could read the diary in full. The university was pleased to have the diary examined by someone who could interpret its content, and I provided a description of it for their cataloguing system. Hoffman also sent me a copy of Adams' alumnus record: Adams had studied taxidermy at this university, as well as at Henry Ward's biological supply house in Rochester, New York.

  After I started at Auckland Museum C.F. Adams was one of the hundreds of names of collectors or presenters of specimens that I came to know as I became ever more familiar with the land vertebrates collection and its documentation. He was listed as the source of several American bird specimens and mammals from Borneo. I knew many names of donors, but in most cases had no idea who the people were.

  In the late 1990s, in Auckland Museum's archives, I came across five letters from Adams to Cheeseman, and found Cheeseman's replies in the museum's letter books—the duplicated copies of outgoing letters. I could see from the context that Adams must have been the unnamed American taxidermist whose employment was alluded to in the museum's annual reports at that time. Adams' letters had been written after he left Auckland, and he reported his latest activities to Cheeseman in a spirit of respectful friendship. Cheeseman's letters were headed “Dear Mr Adams” and the replies were signed “C.F. Adams”, so at this stage even Adams' first name remained a mystery to me.

  Around 2005 I was invited to write a chapter on Auckland Museum for an American book on the history of Australasian bird collections. The editor saw my subheading “C.F. Adams” when the names of other taxidermists were given in full, and on his own initiative searched for and found an obituary of Adams in an American bird journal. At last I had the full name: Charles Francis Adams. Then, unexpectedly, there came the diary, with its detail on the minutiae of Adams' life in Auckland and elsewhere.

  After the delight of the diary I received further news from John Hoffmann. He had tracked down a photograph of Adams that had been taken in connection with the university's alumni records. An email with an attachment arrived. This was a big moment. I paused, double-clicked, and there he was. From C.F. Adams of the museum registers, to Charles Francis Adams of the obituary, to the neat handwriting of the diary, I co
uld now see his likeness. The photograph was a studio portrait of a handsome young man with neat short hair and a moustache long enough to obscure his upper lip. He seemed every bit the Adams of the diary—sober, thoughtful and conscientious, diligent in his work and aiming high in his standards.

  Adams left his home in Champaign, Illinois for New Zealand on December 10, 1884 at the age of twenty-seven. His train journey to San Francisco took eight days because he travelled on the narrow-gauge Denver and Rio Grande Railway through mountainous Colorado, rather than on the more direct Union Pacific line to Ogden in Utah. He may have been taking the opportunity to see new country. His diary is full of notes on scenery, landforms, vegetation, railway engineering, the evidence of extractive industries such as coal shafts and stone quarries, and cattle ranches. A desire for even more travelling was probably why he would leave Auckland Museum after just two years, collecting birds and mammals in Borneo. His letters to Cheeseman also reported on a trip he made to the Galápagos Islands, and he had ambitions for further travel despite suffering from seasickness.

  From San Francisco, Adams took the mail steamer Zealandia across the Pacific to Auckland, departing on Christmas Eve. The ship, a single-screw steamer with one funnel, was also rigged for sail with four masts and had a speed of thirteen knots. Built in Glasgow in 1875, it carried up to 300 passengers (in three classes) and had British officers and a Chinese crew.

  The voyage started badly. “I was taken miserably sick and went to the side to vomite [sic]. The rain wet me from above and the waves broke over the deck so my feet were soaked with water.” On Christmas Day he felt dizzy and could eat nothing and the misery continued for two more days. On the 28th he felt better but the drinking water was poor and he was very thirsty. Seasickness returned next day and he was pessimistic about the rest of the trip, wondering if he was wise to have travelled in steerage. His spirits lifted on the 31st: he could still not eat a “hearty meal” but the weather was fine.

  When he arrived Adams was favourably impressed by Auckland, noting: “The city looks quite nice as the buildings are new looking which gives a look of freshness.” He was impressed with the cleanliness of the streets, which were sprinkled from a nozzle screwed on to a hydrant: the water moved the dirt along. On his first Sunday he went walking and was “much pleased to see fine flower beds in the front of residences”: “The city park [Albert Park] is very nicely kept and being situated higher than a part of the city a splendid view is to be had from it.”

  There were worries though. One evening a fire broke out in the marble works near a rope-making factory. “It seems that a great many fires occur for the size of the place as the alarm is sounded almost every night. The hills keep the firemen [presumably with hand-hauled equipment] from arriving quickly on the spot.”

  Adams noted that he was required by the museum to assist in taking “readings” daily, including on Sundays. He often referred to going “up” to read the instruments. Auckland Library has a magnificent photograph of Princes Street taken in 1902 by Henry Winkelmann, which is reproduced opposite page one of this book. It shows the museum building side-on from a higher vantage point. On the roof, behind the façade, wooden steps lead up to a small platform on which are visible a Stevenson screen—a louvred enclosure to shelter meteorological instruments from rain and direct sun—and an anemometer, consisting of rotating arms with hemispherical cups at the ends, for measuring wind speed.

  The letter-books record that about every month Cheeseman would send a note to James Hector, director of the Colonial Museum in Wellington, listing meteorological data. Adams' diary helped to recover the fact, long forgotten, that Auckland Museum had run a weather station in the 1880s, probably as part of a national network.

  Tallying up the specimens mentioned in the diary shows Adams prepared at least 124 birds, fish, reptiles and marine invertebrates in the first six months. Many of the birds were foreign and with these he must have been finishing off specimens the museum had received as roughed-out skins from overseas suppliers. Notable New Zealand species that Adams processed included a New Zealand “thrush” or piopio (probably Turnagra capensis), now extinct, which he mounted in January 1885, and “owl parrots”, or kākāpō (Strigops habroptilus) that he worked on later in the year. In April 1885 someone brought in a blue-wattled crow, or kōkako (Callaeas wilsoni), that had been killed in the Waitakere Ranges near Auckland.

  Adams spoke to Cheeseman about using the workshop after hours to build up a personal collection of birds. In due course he could take these back to America for sale. Cheeseman had been “very obliging indeed”, his main concern being that Adams “be careful about turning the gas out”.

  In 2011 I visited the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. to look at birds that Auckland Museum had sent there on exchange in the 1880s. Among these were several study-skins with plain manila-coloured labels in Charles Adams' handwriting. He would have prepared these during his paid hours at Auckland Museum and they would have been selected by Cheeseman as currency in the exchanges.

  Just from the label I could tell if a specimen was from Auckland Museum. At the time the museum used manila labels (they seemed to be commercial luggage labels) that had a dull pink eyelet to strengthen the hole for stringing, and some characteristic printed lettering from the manufacturer. Another clue was that the order of the information on Adams' labels was always Latin name, sex, common name, location, date (with a slash between the month and year) and eye-colour, as in the following example from a label attached to tūī—a kind of honeyeater—in the Smithsonian collection:

  Prosthemadera novae-zealandiae

  ♀

  Tui

  Motu Tapu [Motutapu Island near Auckland]

  Aug. / 85

  Iris brown

  Also among the Smithsonian tūī I found a study-skin with a preprinted Adams' label inscribed “C. F. ADAMS' NEW ZEALAND COLLECTION”. This had to be a bird from Adams' private collection, which he had sold directly to the Smithsonian or a third party. Many New Zealand birds that Adams prepared while at Auckland Museum remain in the collection there, but others will have been distributed to museums around the world by exchange from Auckland Museum or through the disposal of Adams' own collection.

  On Tuesday, May 12, 1885, while Adams and Cheeseman were upstairs in the main part of the museum, a man stole a copy of Walter Buller's A History of the Birds of New Zealand from the taxidermy workshop. Adams would have used the coloured plates in this book as reference for his taxidermy work. Two days later a detective reported the stolen book had been recovered. Next day another detective advised that the thief had been apprehended.

  Adams and Cheeseman had to attend court several times, but at his appearance on July 6 the thief pleaded guilty and neither man was called as a witness. The Auckland Star reported how the story unfolded:

  A LITERARY LARCENY. - George Edward Dalton, alias Henry J. Atkins, was charged with the larceny of Dr. Buller's work on New Zealand birds, from the Auckland Museum, on the 12th of May, 1885. - Prisoner pleaded guilty, and stated that he had taken the book, not being aware of its great value. He was destitute at the time, and acted on the impulse of the moment. - His Honor [sic] stated that as this was not the prisoner's first offence, he must sentence him to six months imprisonment with hard labour.

  Living in New Zealand, Adams could not avoid hearing about Britain's imperial wars. He noted on February 13, 1885 that a topic among his circle was “the condition in Soudan”: General Gordon had been shot dead by rebels at Khartoum on January 26. The following month the focus had shifted to the “Russian Scare”—”People here are very much excited over the trouble with Russia and defensive measures are being taken. ... About noon [on April 10] a telegram announcing the crossing of the front, by the Russians, was received [by the newspapers] and caused considerable excitement.”

  On April 22, Adams noted Auckland's increasing preoccupation with the prospect of war, and five days later he called on the US Consul in Auckland to
get reassurance he would not be liable for any New Zealand military duty. On the way back from collecting marine invertebrates on the North Shore, Cheeseman and Adams stopped to see the “defensive works” on North Head: artillery batteries were being built to defend the port.

  In his spare time Adams often walked to the wharves, a great attraction in a port city, and saw the international shipping that was the colony's lifeline to the outside world. He marvelled at the technology. Aboard the steamer Doris, which had arrived from Britain with immigrants, he was impressed it was “lighted with electricity”. On the Waimate he looked through the galley and was shown the apparatus for making freshwater from sea water. There was a poignant moment one Sunday in June 1885 when he again saw his “own” ship Zealandia. As the vessel departed into the darkness he “turned away and thought of her long trips and how many prayers have been offered up for her safety, as she ploughs the seas, by dear friends left behind”.

  The diary entries stop abruptly at July 12 that year, as if Adams were suddenly tired of making a detailed record. After this there are three isolated accounts of local trips from Auckland to offshore islands. “Trip to Kerewa [Karewa] Island” covers a visit in December 1886 to this tiny island that lies about six kilometres off Tauranga in the Bay of Plenty. The island was well known for its tuatara, lizard-like reptiles that lived in association with burrowing seabirds. Adams' objective was probably to collect the specimens he later used to construct a small diorama at the museum, where the tuatara were depicted at a burrow.