The Owl That Fell from the Sky (10 page)

Mr Mackechnie's Arctic group

In the late nineteenth century Auckland's only zoo was the “gardens” of the Auckland Acclimatisation Society in the Domain, where the public could see a limited range of captive birds and mammals. Coloured books were too expensive for many households, so it fell to Auckland Museum and the city's public library to inspire citizens with a real taste of the wonders of the animal kingdom.

The museum evolved a grand plan to fill the centre of the main hall of its Princes Street building with groups of large mammals, which its annual report for 1899–1900 hoped “would enhance the appearance of the Museum, and add to its value as a means of recreation to the general public”.

Edmund Augustus Mackechnie, a solicitor and local politician, had served on the museum's governing board and knew of this plan. When he died in 1901, Auckland Museum Library and Auckland Art Gallery were major beneficiaries in his will, but there was also a smaller bequest of £500 to Auckland Museum to procure groups of large stuffed mammals and the necessary showcases in which to display them.

The museum curator, Thomas Cheeseman, could now at last place orders with the prominent London taxidermy firm of Edward Gerrard & Sons, from whom Cheeseman expected “a higher class of taxidermy than we could hope for in the Colony”. Gerrard & Sons began in 1850, flourished during the late Victorian and Edwardian heyday of taxidermy, and persisted until 1967. Its prices were lower than those of its more famous London competitor Rowland Ward and the work more variable in quality, although its best work was exemplary.

Gerrards produced an extraordinary range of products, from habitat groups for museums to trophy heads on shields, birds in glass cases, and a startling diversity of “animal furniture”. Its mounted mammals were supplied to museums in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, to the British Museum (Natural History), and to museums in Europe, North America and Africa.

The museum had a wish list of particular exotic mammals but this had to be tempered by availability. Gerrards proposed an “Arctic Group” comprising a polar bear (
Ursus maritimus
) and three musk oxen (
Ovibos moschatus
)—two adults and a calf. Cheeseman specified “plenty of action in the group, always provided that the attitudes, etc, are correct and characteristic, and true to nature”. The final arrangement had the ever-hungry polar bear prowling at the edge of the oxen, showing an uncommon interest in the young musk ox.

Musk oxen roam the Arctic tundra, where they eat grasses, sedges and herbage. They live in groups of ten to twenty, and at times of danger bunch together, often in a circle or semicircle with the calves inside. The largest males reach 400 kilograms. The coarse outer guard hairs shed rain and snow, and protect an inner coat of fine soft hair that keeps out the cold.

Polar bears, the largest of all living bears, are predators of musk oxen and other animals such as seals. Their front paws are large and oar-like to assist swimming. The soles of their feet are hairy, which insulates against the cold and provides a grip on icy surfaces.

 

 

The museum purchased four mammal groups in succession over four years, the Arctic group being the third, and at £100 the largest and most expensive. Transporting the exhibits halfway around the world from Britain could have been prohibitive, but the Shaw Savill Line—shipper of numerous immigrants to New Zealand, including myself in 1961—came to the party by carrying the Arctic group free of charge. It arrived safely in 1906.

The exhibit was three and a half metres long but the diorama base was in three sections: it had been specified that each mammal group had to come knocked down in sections not exceeding four feet (1.2 metres) wide so they could fit through the museum's main entrance door. It was installed in the centre of the exhibition gallery so it could be viewed from all sides, with the section joins hidden by powdered gypsum covering the floor of the display to resemble snow. According to the museum's annual report for 1905–06 the mammal groups had “attracted considerable attention” and contributed to an increase in annual museum visitor numbers to 61,000.

Around 1929 the Arctic group was moved from the museum's Princes Street building to the new war memorial building in the Domain, where it was exhibited in various galleries until the late 1990s. It was then moved into storage, awaiting a return in 2002 for the museum's 150th anniversary exhibition. Today it occupies a temporary position in the Children's Weird and Wonderful Discovery Centre.

The polar bear and musk oxen are, apart from some fading, in excellent condition, and still together as a habitat group on their original bases. There is perfect realism in the animals' poses, and an excellent finish, particularly in their faces. The elegance and dynamism of the group, viewed from any angle, is still as pleasing as it must have been to the public in 1906. Surviving examples of high-quality taxidermy like this are precious.

The museum's three other mammal groups
—a
male lion, a female lion and four cubs, two tigers and a leopard, and a South African quartet comprising a zebra, waterbuck, springbok and impala—have not survived.

Among old photographs of museum interiors in the 1920s there is one with a small but tantalising end-on view of the tiger group. In all my years at the museum I had found no reference to the tigers' fate, nor even clear images or descriptions of the animals, when suddenly in 2008 Martin Collett, the museum's manuscripts librarian, found a cutting from an old illustrated newspaper that he thought might interest me. It included a stunning photograph of the lost tigers, one crouching and snarling, the other standing upright on a slight rise and looking out into the distance. The caption described them as “Tigers from the Deccan, central India”.

 

Charles Adams' orang-utan

In 1890 a steamer brought a cargo of stuffed animals to Auckland. Among them was an orang-utan (
Pongo pygmaeus
), a hairy reddish-brown great ape from the rainforests of Sumatra and Borneo and one of our closest cousins in the evolutionary tree of life. Thomas Cheeseman, curator of Auckland Museum, was pleased with the animals' good condition. Pending construction of a display case, he placed them in the museum's lecture room. He wrote to the taxidermist, reporting that he had heard “nothing but praises of the manner in which they are mounted”.

Most of the visitors who saw the stuffed animals in the museum's small Princes Street building would have seen nothing like them before. They would have marvelled at the orang-utan's human features, whether or not they knew its name is Malay for “man of the forest”. Orang-utans, adapted for a life in the trees, have the longest arms of any apes, and the stuffed one, an adult male with expanded cheek flaps, was mounted with one arm raised.

The taxidermist was a young American named Charles Adams. Adams was born near Champaign, Illinois, in 1857. He studied taxidermy at the University of Illinois and later worked at Henry Augustus Ward's well-known Natural Science Establishment in Rochester, New York. Ward's continues today as a biological supply house for educational institutions and museums, and its catalogue of specimens and materials is the thickness of a large telephone directory.

In about 1881 Henry Ward visited Auckland, where he met Cheeseman and learned the museum was having difficulty obtaining the services of a taxidermist. No skilled taxidermist was available locally, and many new-found specimens—such as unusual birds and trophy fish of record-breaking size—were going to waste. Ward undertook to help find the museum an American taxidermist, and by 1884 arrangements were set. The man's arrival in Auckland was eagerly anticipated until word came that he had died. Another had to be selected, and this was Charles Adams.

Adams reached Auckland in January 1885. Cheeseman liked him very much, finding him “a fair workman, very attentive to his duties, and a nice quiet fellow into the bargain”. In the first year, Adams probably spent most of his time mounting local birds newly brought to the museum, and foreign birds and mammals that had been received in recent years in an unfinished state. He then travelled to collect material in the Auckland area, and further afield to Pirongia in the Waikato, Cuvier Island off Coromandel Peninsula and Karewa Island in the Bay of Plenty.

In 1886, the museum used Adams' skills in pioneering attempts to go beyond individual animals in glass cases: it produced two small “habitat groups”—or, as they are known today, dioramas. This was less than ten years after the first museum displays showing natural history specimens in their natural contexts appeared in Britain and the United States.

One Auckland habitat group was in a wooden case, on legs, with a glazed front about one and a half metres wide, and depicted burrow entrances shared by shearwaters and tuatara on an offshore island. The tuatara (
Sphenodon punctatus
) is a large lizard-like reptile unique to New Zealand and one of the animals that puts New Zealand on the map zoologically.

Living reptiles of the world are divided into four orders and the tuatara is the sole representative of one of them. (The other three orders are turtle-like animals, crocodiles and their kin, and the closely related snakes and lizards.) On suitable islands, tuatara benefit from seabirds: they may shelter in the birds' burrows (although they can excavate their own), eat the insects that thrive in the guano-rich soil, and devour an occasional chick. There is no benefit to the birds from the presence of the reptiles.

The other of Charles Adams' dioramas showed a ravine in the Southern Alps. Some examples of New Zealand's alpine parrot, the kea (
Nestor notabilis
), were pecking at a dead, bloodstained lamb. The propensity of these large intelligent parrots to attack lambs and sheep had become popular knowledge and led to their persecution. Today we accept that their impact on sheep is fairly minor compared with other causes of sheep loss to the farmer: attacks are largely confined to sheep that are sick, injured, or stuck in mud or snow.

Graham Turbott, a long-time curator at Auckland Museum and later the museum's director, suspected the kea diorama, which he remembered from his childhood, sent a thrill of horror through Auckland's Victorian children, and that many a sobbing girl or boy must have been taken home by shaken parents. The case was dismantled, probably in the 1930s, perhaps in the hope of mending the kea's reputation.

Early in 1887 Adams left Auckland. Cheeseman wrote to a zoologist, “I am sorry that my present assistant, Adams, cannot see his way to remain, for he is a really good all-round man—both in taxidermy, osteology and modelling.”

Adams journeyed south to Dunedin and reported to Cheeseman by letter on what he saw. The Colonial Museum in Wellington was “not well advanced in a zoological direction” and things were “not nicely arranged and gotten up”. At Canterbury Museum in Christchurch there was a large and valuable collection, but he was again disappointed with the animals. The museum was “not nicely kept”: “old labels are left tied to the legs of birds and the mounting is not good”. Dunedin's Otago Museum, where there was a large zoological collection pleasingly arranged in wall cases and the specimens were well done and well kept, was the one he liked best.

Adams was held up at Port Chalmers in Dunedin for three days while the SS
Mariposa
had a new propeller fitted. When it finally sailed for Sydney the steamship company gave the passengers the consolation of calling in at Milford Sound.

In Melbourne, Adams met a young man who had been three years in British North Borneo, now Sabah, Malaysia. He decided to go there armed with letters of introduction to the young man's friends and the governor. From the capital, Sandakan, he planned to collect bird and mammal specimens, which he would prepare and sell to museums. Cheeseman was one subscriber, in December 1887 making a transfer of £50 to Adams via a bank in Singapore.

 

 

By 1888 Adams had safely returned to the United States. Meanwhile, skins of Bornean mammals had been sent to Auckland, unfinished, in a cask of brine, and arrived after long delays. With again no taxidermist, Cheeseman had to consider sending the skins overseas to be mounted and asked Adams if he would do the work back in Champaign. In letters, he gave Adams many instructions on how the mammal skins, particularly that of the orang-utan, should look. Finally, the finished mounts were shipped to Auckland from Adams' workshop, and in 1890 Cheeseman wrote to acknowledge safe receipt. The total bill came to £47.11.3, with unexpected shipping costs adding another £29. By the end the orang-utan skin was much travelled—from Sandakan to Auckland, and from there to the United States and back again.

Amid the praise for Adams' skilful work, Cheeseman had just one criticism—“Would it not have been better to have shewn the teeth of the orang?”

Adams responded, “The lips of an orang-utan are so exceedingly thick that, to me, an open mouth is a disgusting sight, and besides I could not think of a natural excuse why the animal should have its mouth open.” He had replaced the skull with a wooden substitute, into which he could nail winged wooden sides to provide firm support for the protruding cheek flaps.

Auckland Museum's mammals from Borneo were placed in a new case specially erected in the centre of the main hall. The annual report declared them to be in many respects the most important acquisition for several years. The orang-utan boasted a label beautifully printed in gold lettering on thick dark-brown card with a bevelled gold edge. Auckland Museum had around a hundred visitors on weekdays and two hundred on Sundays, and the Bornean mammals helped delight and educate the public.

Charles Adams was now supplying his work to several public museums in America and anticipating a successful career as a celebrated taxidermist. He told Cheeseman that, despite a tendency to suffer badly from seasickness, he was thinking of taking another tour of the world, and also thinking of a trip within the United States to collect skins of large mammals. In 1891 he joined a six-month expedition to the Galápagos Islands and was afterwards engaged by the Illinois State Laboratory of Natural History to install bird exhibits in the state's display at the Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago in 1892 and 1893. He ended a letter to Cheeseman with the hope that Cheeseman would come to the Chicago World Fair and allow him the chance to entertain him.

It was not to be. Adams, aged thirty-six, died suddenly in May 1893 from “congestion of the brain”—probably meningitis or encephalitis. An obituary described him as “a zoological collector of wide experience and a superior taxidermist ... a man of sterling qualities [whose] frank, genial, and modest disposition won enduring friendships for him wherever he went”.

About 1928 Charles Adams' orang-utan moved from the Princes Street building that Adams had known to the grand new building on the hill in Auckland Domain. When I started at the museum in 1982, it was in a large corner case devoted to primates in a natural history gallery. Today these galleries are devoted entirely to New Zealand material. The much-travelled orang-utan from Sandakan, prepared by the well-liked taxidermist from America, resides in a social history gallery celebrating childhood.