Ian Hutton, The Lord Howe Island Signal
As Curator of the museum, I get a lot of requests via email: people wanting to know about a relative’s visit in the past; the story of a particular yacht’s visit; the identity of a bone found on a Lord Howe beach; or maybe people wanting to donate photos or an object.
However, in May of this year, I received a most unusual email. A journalist from New Zealand contacted me asking if I considered the photo of a stuffed white bird seen in an antique shop there was the long-extinct flightless White gallinule of Lord Howe Island. My eyes opened wide, my heart raced …. what if this was a specimen of Lord Howe’s extinct, White gallinule? If so, it would be a priceless asset to have in our museum.
The Lord Howe White gallinule is thought to have been shot to extinction by visiting sailors by 1800 and there are only two skins of this bird known in the world: one in a Liverpool (U.K.) museum, and the other in a museum in Austria. A number of artists drawings of the bird are known, and the Island museum holds some of these rare prints dating back to 1790.
My mind went into overdrive …. should I get on a plane immediately and fly to New Zealand to track it down? Or should I try to locate the antique shop and make an offer over the phone?
After my initial excitement quietened down, I began to think rationally: the specimen looked to be in too good condition to have been 220 years old; and just how likely would it be that one had ended up in New Zealand, and taxidermized? I knew that the first settlers to the island, who came in 1834, were from New Zealand, and had returned there about 1840. Perhaps they had taken a skin back with them, but this was highly unlikely, as by all accounts the bird was extinct before they arrived.
I googled White Pukeko and up came several recent rare accounts of white forms of Pukekos being seen on farmland in New Zealand.
I re-read a science paper of 2016 which contained a table detailing the sizes and descriptions of the only two skins known of our White gallinule, and those of the Australian Purple Swamphen and New Zealand Pukeko. Looking at the photos of the stuffed specimen it seemed to me that the wings were too long, and the legs and feet too large. I felt sure it was not a White gallinule. I did a phone interview with the journalist; and then contacted the shop owner to ascertain a price … three days later I was informed it had been sold.
While it was not actually our White gallinule, I was disappointed. It would have been a nice exhibit to go in our early history gallery with a story and the old 1790 prints we hold of this bird.
An ornithological colleague in UK, Julian Hume, gave this thorough opinion on this bird as the last word – “As much as I would love it to be a Lord Howe Swamphen, this specimen is a Purple Swamphen exhibiting a ‘Dilution’ colour aberration, displaying an all-over light grey plumage with normal bill, legs and feet as these still contain melanin. I would expect the eye to have been normal as well with a red iris and black pupil. Also, this bird is very much one that can fly as it has long wings, especially the sharp primaries, a long tail and typical swamphen legs and feet. In the Lord Howe bird, the wings are extremely short and primaries rounded, the tail is almost invisible and the legs and feet are shorter and much more robust.”
This article appeared the The Lord Howe Island Signal, 1 August 2022.
