The Owl That Fell from the Sky Read Free Page B

field trip that had failed to find spotless crakes at a likely location that at least they had seen some beautiful crakeless spots.
    The bird collections of the National Museum of New Zealand were greatly enhanced and professionalised by the skill and dedication of Fred Kinsky (1911–99), who joined the museum as a clerk in 1955 and retired as curator of birds in 1976. Kinsky was a Czech aristocrat who became a political refugee and immigrated to New Zealand after the communist takeover of his country in 1948. He was by habit a night person, frequently working at the museum or at home into the early hours of the morning. He seldom arrived at work before ten in the morning, which he referred to as dawn. For a time, a new director attempted to get him to start work at eight-thirty but the results were unproductive and he was allowed to revert to his natural rhythm.
    One of the world’s great bird curators was Ernst Mayr (1904–2005). A German with a passion for natural history, Mayr started his museum career in 1926 as an assistant at the natural history museum in Berlin. Success with field work in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands led to his appointment as a curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 1931, and later at Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. His work with birds collected from islands across the Pacific by the Whitney South Sea Expedition led to new insights into birds’ evolution: he was at the forefront of the twentieth-century reinterpretation and refinement of Darwin’s original ideas.
    Surely one of the most intrepid museum ornithologists was Tom Harrisson, curator of the Sarawak Museum from 1947, and a keen ethnologist and archaeologist. Towards the end of the Second World War, Harrisson was parachuted into Borneo as part of a reconnaissance unit. There he helped rescue downed British airmen. He also organised local dayak tribes against the occupying Japanese—and again in the early 1960s against communist insurgents in the Brunei Revolt.
In 2011, collecting data from skins of long-tailed cuckoos in The Natural History Museum’s collection in Britain, I handled a cuckoo that Harrisson had collected in Vanuatu in 1934.
    War service interrupted the directorship of Auckland Museum by Gilbert Archey (1890–1974). Archey had already served in France during the First World War, but he joined the fray again as a lieutenant colonel in the British Military Administration in Malaya until 1947. Archey amassed much of Auckland Museum’s large moa-bone collection and published a major study of moa in 1941, for which he was awarded a science doctorate by the University of New Zealand.
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    I sometimes need to consult a particular set of old books. Their dull brown spines and shabby appearance are deceptive: at the end of each volume there are exquisite hand-coloured lithographs of birds, and the current monetary value of the set is in the six figures. This twenty-seven-volume Catalogue of the Birds in the British Museum was produced between 1874 and 1898 and is still in use for bird nomenclature. A major contributor was Richard Bowdler Sharpe (1847–1909), who was for thirty-seven years curator of birds at the British Museum (Natural History). Sharpe had ten daughters and several worked for publishers, adding colours by hand to lithographs, perhaps to some of those that illustrated their father’s prestigious books. The New Zealand fernbirds, small brown swampland songbirds, are in the genus Bowdleria named in honour of Sharpe. Elsewhere in the South Pacific he is remembered in the name of the Samoan triller Lalage sharpei .
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    Among the personality traits of the successful curator is the passion to collect. The desire to extend collections, fill in gaps and make holdings bigger, better and more complete is an underlying requirement of the job. But such collecting can get out of hand. Martin Hinton (1883–1961), a