S6E1: Huia - Birds, Museums and Global Commodification

We start Season 6 "Museum Collections/Objects" with Rosa Dyer looking at the Huia, a New Zealand songbird whose dimorphic beaks garnered the attention of science, fashion, and empire. Rosa uses the museum object to ask questions about how different knowledge systems value animals. 

• Pitt Rivers Museum
• Sonic Specimen with Rachel Mundy on The Animal Turn. 
• The 1848 lithograph by John Gould 
• Birds of New Zealand by Walter Buller J.G. Keulemans
• Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene edited by Gregg Mitman, Marco Armiero, Robert S. Emmett
• 'Te Karanga a te Huia | The Call of the Huia', Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision by Sarah Johnston. 
• Huia come Home by Jay Ruka. 

Credits:

• Recorded: 7 November 2023 
• Claudia Hirtenfelder, executive producer, editor and co-host 
• Rosa Dyer, script writer, narrator and co-host
• Rebecca Shen, episode artwork and logo
• Gordon Clarke, bed music
• Other sound effects from BBC Sound Effects, Pixabay, and Epidemic Sound
• Learn more about the team here. 

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• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/TheAnimalTurn 
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Transcript

Siobhan O'Sullivan 0:01

This is another iRoar podcast.

Why Museum Collections Matter

Introducing Co‑Host Rosa Dyer

Claudia Hirtenfelder 0:13

Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Animal Highlight. This is season six, and it's awesome. My co-host this season is Rosa Dyer, and we're going to be talking about museum objects slash collections. Throughout the season, we kind of swing between are we doing collections or objects? But I think I'm probably going to settle on museum collections because objects are part of collections. And anyway, in this season, we're going to be talking all about museum collections and the objects that you find in those collections. And throughout each episode, Rosa tries to track the traces of the animals and some of the animal connections and relationships that come to the fore when you focus in on specific objects in museums. Rosa Dyer is a collaborative doctoral project PhD candidate at Birkbeck College, University of London, and the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. Her practice-based project at the Pitt Rivers Museum focuses on featherwork collections made by South American Indigenous peoples. Her work aims to reveal the dynamic relations that exist between birds, people, and environments by working with Indigenous collaborators to reimagine how the feathered objects are represented in the museum. And the first couple of uh episodes in the season focus explicitly on birds. And then Rosa starts to branch out a bit from birds to other objects that you find in Oxford and at the Pitt Rivers Museum. And then eventually we end up in a place quite unexpected, I think, at the end of the season. But to kick us off, we're going to speak about a bird whose name I find really difficult to say. That's the Huia. And uh Rosa speaks about some of the indigenous relationships that this bird has had and some of the practices that came about with regards to getting these feathers to look a particular way. And it raises a whole host of questions. So I hope you enjoy listening. Hello Rosa. Welcome to the Animal Highlights. Hello, thank you for having me. It's great to have you on the show, and I'm very, very much looking forward to this series. You've got a pretty unique perspective and way in which you're carrying out your animal highlights. So I think it's going to be a fantastic season. But before we get into it, uh can you tell the listeners a little bit about you and your research?

Rosa Dyer 2:32

Sure. So I'm in my final year of my PhD. I'm based in the UK. And it's quite a kind of different PhD, I guess, from your kind of normal thesis-based academic PhD, in that it's specifically linked to a museum, which is the Pitt Rivers Museum, which is part of the University of Oxford, which is an ethnographic museum. And so my project is specifically linked to certain objects in the museum, which is their featherwork collections. So my background is kind of in ethnobiology. And with the featherwork, my approach is kind of to look at the political, cultural, and ecological connections that featherwork has and think about the ways that we can work collaboratively with communities to try and represent these featherworks in different ways within the museum.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 3:13

What is ethnobiology? Is it kind of what you're saying there?

Rosa Dyer 3:17

The mixture of Yeah, so it's, I suppose, sits somewhere between the disciplines of anthropology and biology. So rather than focusing just on kind of Western academic science and the kind of traditional scientific approaches to biology and ecology and the natural world, uh, ethnobiology, or the kind of subsection I work on, which is ethnoornithology, thinks about the dynamic relationships that are held between people, birds, and environments from multiple different perspectives and particularly wants to kind of give credit and attention to indigenous perspectives on how people relate to, in my case, birds and environments.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 3:53

I see that's really interesting. And if I understand you correctly, so you're doing your PhD and you're looking at Pitt Rivers Museum, which is in the the UK and Oxford, right? Yes. Um, and you're looking at specific objects in that museum and kind of telling a more dynamic history of them than just kind of, I guess what we would call like an environmental history. You're going more in depth and in detail with them.

Biocultural Views Of Featherwork

Rosa Dyer 4:17

Yeah, so because it's an ethnographic museum and also the Pitt Rivers Museum is very particular in that its labels are very, very small. It doesn't have a lot of information about the kind of particularities of the communities that made them, or, you know, in the case of featherworks, which birds were used to make them. So on the first hand, it's exploring which birds are used from kind of a very analytical perspective of just identifying the feathers. But then also from another perspective, uh, what is called kind of a biocultural perspective, is thinking about the really kind of diverse and interesting kind of entanglements and relations that these featherworks can represent in terms of what they say about the relationships between people and environments and how kind of the feather works themselves are quite representative of what birds mean for people or how they symbolically represent things, and then also how these featherworks can teach us about the changing relationships between the people and environments, whether this is things like um climate change or environmental degradation. Um, and it can also feed into things like politics, so stuff like changing land rights, for example, or how featherworks are being used in terms of the activist practice of these indigenous communities of wearing their featherworks as markers of identity to kind of claim their rights to land and their rights to exist, basically, a lot of the time.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 5:31

Yeah, and of course, entangled therein is also the lives of the animals themselves, right?

Rosa Dyer 5:35

How do we I mean, especially for this podcast, which is kind of the perspective we focus on, I suppose, is yeah, thinking about, you know, the agency of animals in this. Because often at times, particularly actually thinking about and listening to uh people coming into the museum and hearing what they say about the featherworks, the first thing they often say is, oh, poor birds, though, you know, these have been killed for these kind of quite frivolous artistic practices. And I think that's I, you know, a very understandable first reaction to seeing, you know, this wall of feathers. But I think there's also a lot more of an interesting thing to be thought about in terms of how do birds kind of maintain their agency when we place their bodies within museums, which is a lot of kind of what I'm hoping to do with this highlight series is explore that question of how much of the bird and its life history and its ecology can we preserve or is kind of conserved when we place it in a museum, and what is severed in terms of that kind of through line of the biography of the animal and its afterlife.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 6:32

That's super fascinating. I'm very interested in how animal histories are told and the kind of creative practices we can use to tell them. So that's um wonderful. So why don't you tell us a little bit about um this coming season and and what listeners can expect?

Animal Agency Inside Museums

Rosa Dyer 6:46

Yeah, so as I said, um I work in museums and I work particularly on this kind of connection between the animal, particularly birds to be honest, but the animal in general and how they become placed in museums, what that process of kind of museumification is when we put an animal and its body in a museum, and what can we learn from that process? And so I'm going to be thinking about with these highlights kind of how certain animals, their bodies and their afterlives have been collected, catalogued, and encased within museums. Um, the histories of their objects and their kind of connection to living animals, I think, is a really interesting question, particularly, you know, this idea of continuity that perhaps exists between the animal as it lives in its expi as it lives in its environment, you know, its particular life history, how it relates to other animals and people, and then kind of what happens through that process of it being extracted from that natural environment, the process of it being moved into a museum, and then how that museum contextualizes that animal and kind of nods to these connections of its lived life, so to speak. So that's what I'm going to be exploring. Um I'm going to be looking at animals hopefully from a variety of different places, from natural history museums and world culture museums. Um, obviously, because of my kind of research focus, I think a lot of them probably will be from the Pitt Rivers, because this is where I've kind of delved in deepest. But um yeah, I think we'll we'll see how we get there. But yeah, I'm really excited to explore and talk about this with you.

Season Roadmap And Methods

Claudia Hirtenfelder 8:09

I'm excited to learn more from you as well. This is um yeah, this is really fascinating. I'm I'm really excited to see where we end up uh with all of this. But why don't we get to it? Let's get started. So who who is um the or what objectslash who is our first uh focus for today?

The Huia Object In Oxford

Rosa Dyer 8:26

So our first focus is going to be um, well, I'll maybe introduce the object first because obviously we're going to focus on the the kind of who the animal is, but I think maybe leaping in with the object is a good starting point. Um I will also say as well that um I'm going to write some blog posts for the Animal Turn website that will have images of all these objects on, and also the images of the bird I'm talking about, because obviously with museums, the visual is something that is kind of the center, and we obviously have a little bit of a disconnect here with it being a podcast. So I invite everyone to go and look at the blog as well to kind of be able to see the object as I describe it. But the first object we're going to be talking about is one that is in the Pit Rivers Museum. It's in the lower gallery with all the rest of the featherworks that exist there. And it's one that I came across because usually my focus is on South American featherworks, that kind of what's the majority of my research is focused on. And one day I was in the Pit Rivers and walked past this case that had had this object in it, which is basically it's only described in the museum label as an ornament from New Zealand. And it's this flattened bird skin, um kind of dark brown with all of its feathers still on it, and you can still kind of see that its beak is attached, but it doesn't have any wings and it doesn't have any feet. And so immediately I was kind of drawn to it as this, you know, bird-like object, but not also not a full bird. So that's kind of what caught my eye. And then the second thing that caught my eye was that it had been identified. So the only other information that was on the card was that this was a huya. And this is a bird that I hadn't ever heard of before. Um, and I was actually in the museum with my um doctoral supervisor, and he said, Oh, like have you heard of the Huyya? It has this amazing but really tragic story about um its process of extinction and its kind of port importance for New Zealand and for New Zealand um indigenous people.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 10:08

And so sorry to interrupt you there. You say who who was it?

Rosa Dyer 10:13

So it's huya, so it's H-U-I-A.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 10:17

H-U-I-A, okay.

Rosa Dyer 10:18

All right, so it's purposely quite um, I mean, I'll talk about it a bit later, but it's purposely quite onomatopoeic, I think, um, in its in its name. Um so it's yeah, it's this bird I'd never heard of before, and it took me honestly down a real like rabbit hole of a research tangent, as I think is often the case with doctoral students trying to procrastinate in a productive way. Um but yeah, it was its story kind of really captured me and was so fascinating and so tragic the story of its of its extinction and the the kind of the factors and processes that led to it. That um I thought it was a really interesting place for us to start in terms of this theories for thinking about how museums are linked to ideas of things like ecological change and colonialism and also the forces of global consumerism that I think are really inherently linked to the practice of collecting in museums, that it's not a neutral practice, it's something that can be really, really damaging for the ecology of the objects that then become kind of moved into the museum.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 11:16

I had Rachel Mundy on the show a couple of seasons back on the Animal Turn, and we spoke about sonic specimens. And for me, like I'd never really thought about specimens and their kind of significance in terms of how they're located in global economies or histories of colonialism. And she really drove it home for me, kind of thinking about museums in this more critical way. And it's really fascinating when you start to unpack those structures a bit.

Naming, Story, And First Questions

What The Huia Looked Like

Rosa Dyer 11:40

Yeah, absolutely. It's something that I think as you walk into a museum, you kind of, I mean, particularly as well when you can identify the animals. And you know, natural history museums are one thing, but in a way, kind of objects that have been transformed by people even more beyond kind of taxidermy, I think these are one of the spaces where these questions about the links between consumerism and capitalism and kind of the extractive nature that is kind of the idea of empire, the museum itself is kind of a museum of that entire concept, I think. So yeah, that's kind of been a central thought in my mind during during my whole doctoral research. And, you know, even though it's not necessarily the kind of center of what my PhD research is, because that's based on Latin American objects, um, this has been one that I just whenever I walk past it, I kind of there's sort of deep sadness falls over me. And I think it's yeah, it's one of those stories that really needs to be told. Yeah, so as I said, the Huya is was an extinct, uh, I suppose is is an extinct bird. Um, it was an iconic bird for New Zealand. Um it was a kind of attractive, medium-sized bird, um, had these beautiful glossy wings and a distinctive white tip to its tail feathers. They had 12 tail feathers. Um, they had these also kind of bright orange fleshy lobes on either side of its face, which were known as wattles, and they're part of the wattle bird family. And there are a few kind of extant species that still exist in New Zealand today. Um, and the thing that was most distinctive about them was their bill shape. So they had extremely kind of interestingly sexually dimorphic bill shapes, and this was kind of seen as something that when they were discovered that by naturalists was seen as very unique among birds at the time. And actually, originally it led when they were first described by Western science to classing them as two separate species. So the males have a beak that is very short and dagger-like, and the one in the Pitt Rivers Museum is a male, you can see it has this kind of very short bill, and the females had a long, curved bill shape. And the difference in bills was kind of representative of how they operated in the wild. So they existed on the forest floor. Um, there were songbirds, they dwelled close to the floor, and they'd kind of hop around very sweetly, picking up grubs and insects. Um, and their bills worked to help them do this. So they'd work cooperatively together as mated pairs. So the male would tap kind of rotting wood and planks to get the little grubs or to kind of make a hole to reveal the grubs, and then the female would come in with her long curved bill to be able to pick the grub out very delicately. And so to do this, it meant that they were able to then feed their young and also possibly each other, although I've kind of read mixed things about how much proof we have about this. Um, the huya itself, I think it's important to kind of talk about the cultural resonance of this bird as well. So it held and continues to hold a really important cultural place for the indigenous people of New Zealand. So, due to their scarcity and also their distinctive behaviour and striking plumage, the Huya and their feathers were really highly prized by the Maori community. And their black and white tail feathers were often worn by political and religious leaders as a sign of power and nobility. These feathers would probably have been required acquired through traditional hunting techniques, and as I mentioned before, the name Huya is probably onomatopoeic, so it's kind of reflecting the noise that the Huya would have made in the forest. And the Maori hunters would have used this, so they would have mimicked the call of the bird. They were known to be very naturally curious birds, so the hunters would have stood in the forest and made the cool of the Huya in a mimicry, and this would have drawn the birds in and allowed the hunters to then catch the bird in traps. The birds would have then been killed and the Huya would be skinned and their legs and wings removed. And in some cases, as we see with the ornament we find in the Pitt Rivers Museum, the skins would then be stretched and dried over a fire to make ornaments, which would probably have been worn on the ear, or at least this is kind of what the ornament in the Pitt Rivers is thought to be, um, an ear, an earpiece. Um in other cases though, I think just the tail feathers would have been harvested. So they, as I said, they only had 12 on their tails. They were this, they were this kind of quite rare commodity.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 15:33

So how many, how many feathers do birds normally have on their tails?

Rosa Dyer 15:37

I mean, it varies hugely, but I guess not so much, I guess, comparing to other birds, but in terms of the kind of if we place the bird in terms of its kind of natur as a as a material resource, that's quite a limited amount, I think, for you know, the whole pro the whole the whole effort of luring this bird and then killing and capturing it for just 12 feathers seems seems like quite a quite a small. I don't know.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 16:00

And when you say an earpiece, are you meaning like earrings? So you would imagine because you said it was a piece of skin without wings, but so it's actually quite big.

Cooperative Feeding And Bills

Rosa Dyer 16:08

If you imagine kind of um, you know, the size of a large crow is is kind of the size of it, or maybe a little bit smaller than that, but it's it's it's not kind of like a tiny little hummingbird on your ear. It's quite big, so it would have kind of held over the shoulder slightly as well. Um, or at least this is kind of going off what the Pit Rivers piece is. I haven't been able to examine the piece in the Pit Rivers to know how it would have been attached to the ear, of whether it would have been like a loop of string that would have gone over the ear, which you see in some um ear ornaments, or whether it was actually piercing the ear, I'm not sure.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 16:37

I see, interesting. Okay.

Māori Relations And Practices

Rosa Dyer 16:38

But that's kind of how it's described in the museum catalogue, which obviously we kind of take with a pinch of salt because those details can be a bit variable. But that's one use that we that we know they were used for. But I think actually the most common use would have been to just harvest the feathers, and then those feathers themselves were used and worn by um kind of highly important people in the community. So people who had um religious or spiritual or um kind of political power in the community would have worn them. Um in terms of how the Huyah comes into kind of uh natural history and Western science, because I think those are two very different trajectories, and obviously one is a lot later than the other. The bird wasn't discovered when it was first described scientifically, but that point came in 1837 when it was described by John Gould, who was a very famous uh ornithologist and naturalist at the time. And they kind of quickly garnered attention because of this dimorphic bill shape. Um, they, you know, well, all the rage of people who wanted these as museum specimens because they were so rare and they showed this quality which, you know, had not been seen before in ornithology. So, in many ways, tragically, it was the bill's unique bill shape and the attention that this feature attracted from naturalists which kind of led to its decline. Collectors from overseas soon became obsessed with obtaining specimens to showcase this unique characteristic in both museums and then also for their own private collections. And this kind of led to hundreds and hundreds of birds being killed and shipped abroad for them to be then, you know, stripped and used as taxidermy. So, in order to showcase what was perceived as their most kind of intriguing feature, what's so tragic is that often it would be pairs that would be killed together because you couldn't showcase this feature without having both the male and female. And often when you see who you are specimens, particularly in natural history museums today, you see them as a diorama of the male and female next to each other, kind of veterinized in space in this kind of you know frozen portrait of the two next to each other.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 18:37

It's so it's so interesting when you look at environmental museums or or um environmental history museums, because so often, like it wasn't it a similar thing, I think, with the dodo, where um their extinction was somewhat driven by this desire to put them on display. Um and and yeah, like I think about the beaver, for example, that wasn't that was quite different, where I think their near extinction wasn't driven by being put on display, but it was being driven by like fashion trains on the other side of the world.

Skins, Ornaments, And Feathers

Science “Discovers” The Huia

Rosa Dyer 19:05

Absolutely. And that was a huge, a huge aspect for for the Huya as well. And one thing I I think is also worth mentioning as well, and I find kind of so fascinating, is this idea that people were aware that the Huya was in decline when when these specimens were being collected. It wasn't as if no one noticed. Though there are constantly references and books and stuff to people saying, you know, oh, I've got to collect the specimen now or else or else I'm not going to have the chance because it's going to disappear. And I think this sense of inevitability is really central to kind of the extractive practice of colonialism and kind of the idea of empire that these are finite resources, but it's kind of it's kind of seen as a natural progression of what has to happen. You know, one fit one thing, which is the empire, is going to is going to overpower the kind of exterior. And that's fine, and that's an inevitable thing, and we don't really need to do anything about it. But in the meantime, let's collect as many specimens as we can because we need them for our museums. There was never the thought of, well, this decline is happening. What can we perhaps do to mitigate that? What are our conservation practices we could put in place? And so I find that really, really kind of interesting and sad. This kind of, yeah, the idea that the conservation notion hadn't kicked in by that point. It was all about extraction and the material kind of objectification of the birds. Um, but yeah, to kind of feed back into that objectification you mentioned about beavers and fashion, that was kind of the other huge aspect of the Huya and its story that really fed into this, that it wasn't just natural history collectors, it was also the fashion industry that was a huge component of why it went, why it went extinct. Um so on a visit to New Zealand in 1901, actually, George V, the king, who was then actually the Duke of York, he wasn't king yet, but he was presented with a black and white huya feather by a Maori a Maori spiritual leader as a sign of respect. And he placed this feather in his hat and he was photographed with the beautiful feather kind of sticking out of the top of his hat. And this photographed appeared in uh all the newspapers back in the UK. Um, and after that, there was an immediate kind of rush for Huya feathers as a fashion trend. And it kind of coincided with this broader trend that was happening in Victorian fashion for wearing taxidermied birds and feathers and kind of natural history specimens on things like feather fans and hats and brooches, and you know, even on like little things like earrings. We see hummingbird earrings, for example, which uh, you know, kind of are quite bizarre to modern eyes, I think, this idea that you'd kind of adorn yourself with bird bodies in such a such a kind of direct way. Um, but the Huya unfortunately got kind of tangled up in this trend as well. And so the demand for Huya feathers skyrocketed, and also the demand for their beaks went up because things like broaches came up with kind of the the beaks holding jewels was something that was often seen as a kind of brooch accessory. Wow. And so this was another thing that led to the the numbers dwindling. This demand both from kind of the natural history and the kind of museum collecting side of things, and then the fashion industry were two kind of twinned, twinned. Components that were really kind of strong external forces that were leading to the Huya being killed and taken out of New Zealand as kind of materials to then be processed in Europe and America. I think though it's also worth noting that it's not just kind of external factors that were leading to kind of the Huyah's decline, that there were also forces within New Zealand that were leading to it. So as kind of more people moved to New Zealand, there was an extant expansion of pasture land, which led to the deforestation of a lot of these kind of lowland forest environments, which is where the Huyu was found.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 22:34

That's such an interesting thing about New Zealand history, is a lot of people don't realize that New Zealand used to be covered with forests. Like it was a completely forested space. And now people kind of think about New Zealand with regards to sheep and cows and farming. But yeah, that's a complete kind of bastardization of the I mean, if you maybe this is leaning a bit into like idealized ecologies, but it's it's a complete removal of what New Zealand once was, right?

Collectors And Paired Specimens

Fashion, Empire, And Demand

Rosa Dyer 23:00

Yeah, totally. And it's yeah, this kind of transformation of landscape is something that, you know, a bird like the HUA gets caught up in. And, you know, if they can only survive in one particular landscape and that, you know, completely gets deforested, then what are they going to do? So, you know, they were kind of being fired at from all sides, really, that there was, you know, people coming and taking them out, but also they can't exist even, you know, if they they're not even, you know, even if they're not extracted from their environment, their environment is being extracted from them. So, you know, they kind of, yeah, there was no way for them to win really. And, you know, one of the things I think that is really important about this story and is worth talking about is that the Huyah, you know, was a really important bird for the Indigenous communities in in New Zealand. And the communities themselves were the people that noticed this decline in the first place. They were the ones that um that noticed, okay, we know that there aren't as many Huya around. And so they actually placed a taboo on the on the hunting of the Huya in certain places for most of the year in an effort to try and mitigate the fact that this decline was happening. Um, and this was actually a practice that had been in place before the arrival of colonialists in New Zealand. So um there's evidence that they would have already had these practices, and these practices were kind of lost as colonialists came in, but then were reinstated once it was noticed that their numbers were declining. Um, and the movement of the Maori community to do this did have an effect on the New Zealand government. And so um the New Zealand government in 1892 enacted the Wild Birds Protection Act, and the Huyah was placed under that as a bird that shouldn't be hunted. And there even was movement to set up specific sanctuaries for the Huya, which would then be stocked. But unfortunately, it was a bit by that point, kind of a bit little too late. And unfortunately, the bird went extinct before these sanctuaries could be stocked. So, you know, it's this kind of hugely sad story of once action happens, it has to happen fast, or else, you know, this process of decline is already in such emotion that unfortunately nothing could be done about it. And so, you know, the Wild Birds Extinction Acts happens in 1892, but by 1907 is the last, you know, official recording of the bird ever being seen. And so, you know, is now considered extinct by IUCN. And, you know, the legacy of the Huyu, I think, continues on today in its afterlife. You know, we see it in in museums. We still see these taxidermies and these dioramas of the two. A lot of people have written about the Huya. Like most of the information I've got today is from the kind of amazing work of people, a lot of them in New Zealand have done on it. Um, it remains a hugely important bird for the Maori communities, and the b the feathers that do exist are treasured within communities. Um, their songs and their stories are continually uh continue to be told within them, within the communities. And then also kind of from the other side, their feathers maintain a huge market value. So a single feather was sold for uh 8,000 New Zealand dollars in 2010, which was the highest value a feather has ever been has ever been sold at auction. So, you know, these legacies of consumerism and also their importance for communities, kind of these two twin parallels kind of continue even though the living bird no longer exists. And so, you know, every time I walk past that specimen in the Pit Rivers Museum, there's this kind of amazing story that seems to surround it, which unfortunately at the Pit Rivers at the moment isn't isn't necessarily evident to the visitor walking past, but I think should be because we can learn so many things from a single specimen sat behind glass.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 26:22

What an amazing, really, like what an amazing and generative story. And I think what you've done here is just show, I mean, the same could be said, I think, for any object. I know that there's kind of this proliferation of stories that look at like a specific thing, like salt, and you start to unpack the history of salt, and all of a sudden you're like, whoa, there's a lot here. And I think what's really fascinating about what you've done here is there's this kind of tension between various histories, right? Colonial histories, indigenous histories, various fashion trends for the variety of reasons, right? Um, fashion trends in Europe versus, you know, the ornamental trends of indigenous Maori as well. And then, of course, there's the birds themselves, right? And the numerous ways in which they are implicated, entangled, impacted by, you know, this like broad, broad political changes, broad ecological changes, and and that it contributed, as you've, I think, sort of eloquently stated throughout here, to their demise, to their extinction. That these kinds of entanglements aren't neutral or or um, what's the word I'm looking for? They're they're not benign, right? They're not benign.

Landscapes Changed At Home

Rosa Dyer 27:28

And I think what we see, I think what it's a really also interesting example of is these kind of two knowledge systems at play in terms of how the Huya has been approached and kind of responded to by both kind of Western academic naturalists and then the kind of indigenous response in terms of ecological knowledge and conservation practice. So, you know, from the point of view of the collectors who, you know, are proposed to be, you know, people who love the environment and love nature and, you know, want to record it in every possible way. But they never took that step to say, actually, if we want to continue to love nature and continue all of our specimen collecting or whatever, we need to put in steps to protect the living bird and its environment. Whereas the Maori, who, you know, were also hunting and were also killing birds. I think, you know, we've got to be careful of this kind of noble savage idea of, you know, you know, they were cuddling all the birds and it was only the collectors killing them. It was still the Maori, we're still killing them and using the feathers. But they used their, you know, intimate knowledge of the environment and of the birds' life habits, which they'd acquired through these traditional hunting practices, to firstly acknowledge the decline and then put in specific conservation measures to do something about it and try and mitigate it. And I think this kind of representation of two different knowledge systems, of two different conservation strategies, is really interesting. And certainly when we think about, you know, biocultural conservation today, I think increasingly what's being acknowledged is that Western science is not always the only place to look to when we think about conservation strategy, that we have to look more broadly to how communities around the world have historically and today been implementing these kinds of strategies to help protect the natural environment.

Indigenous Conservation Actions

Claudia Hirtenfelder 29:05

There's so much here that I want to talk to you about. Like I want to talk about this idea of loving nature but still killing uh animals. I mean, I think this is an interesting kind of tension uh that a lot of animal studies folks talk about, right? Like, and I think it's been an important intervention of animal studies, in particular critical animal studies, is saying, you know, animals can be thought of in a different way to how an ecocentric lens in terms of um, you know, a broader kind of ecological perspective. And there are tensions here. There are tensions between these different ways of thinking. And I think your juxtaposition of two knowledge systems here shows that there's always been different ways of thinking about how we can relate to nature and and particular animals within those natural environments. But listen, we're gonna, I think, speak forever and ever. It's great, it's great, great to have you on the show. I'm very much looking forward to uh who's coming up next. So um, yes, uh stay staying. Thank you so much. Thank you so much to Rosa for a wonderful animal highlights and for co-hosting this episode with me. Thank you also to Rebecca Shen for doing the Animal Highlight logo and episode artwork, and to Gordon Clark for The Bad Music. Sound effects in this episode were taken from BBC Sound Effects, Pixaday, and Epidemic Sound. This episode was produced by myself. This is the Animal Highlight.

Siobhan O'Sullivan 30:30

It's me, Claudia Hertentfelder.com. That's I R O A R P O D.com.