The Owl That Fell from the Sky (5 page)

The Kaikoura moa egg

One day, probably some time between about 650 and 750 years ago—during the earliest period of Māori settlement of New Zealand—somebody collected an egg from a nest of a South Island giant moa,
Dinornis robustus
. Female giant moa, much larger than their mates, reached three metres tall in an upright standing position, making them the tallest known birds. (The ostrich, the tallest living bird, stands about 2.5 metres tall.) The largest giant moa are estimated to have weighed well over 240 kilograms and had neck vertebrae almost as big as a horse's, although other extinct birds—such as Australia's mihirungs, or giant runners, and Madagascar's elephant birds—were heavier.

The giant egg was not an easy thing to carry home: it was 240 millimetres long, 178 millimetres wide and weighed about four kilograms.

Exercising great skill and care, someone in the family group then used a stone drill-point, rotated by the string in a bow, to make a small round hole about ten millimetres in diameter at the pole of the moa egg's narrower end. What a meal was had: the contents of the giant egg were the equivalent of at least five dozen hens' eggs. But the reason for the great care in opening the egg was that the empty perforated shell made a handy container with a liquid capacity of nearly four litres—a prized possession in a society with no pottery or glass.

Time passed and someone in the Kaikoura settlement where the egg had been collected, or received in trade, died. As was customary, a moa egg—in this case the egg in question—was placed in the grave beside the dead person. The body rested in peace for about 500 years with the egg beside it. Then one day in 1857 a workman was digging foundations for a building close to George Fyffe's house at the whaling station on the northern side of the Kaikoura Peninsula. At each swing of the pick into the ground the workman expected the usual resistance. Then he hit something hollow and stopped. Crouching down to scrape away loose soil and rubble he found that his pick had pierced a large egg and broken away one side of it. A human skeleton, a black stone adze head and other artefacts were at the same spot.

The Kaikoura egg was the first whole moa egg found following European settlement, and larger than any other egg found since. It was destined to excite much interest, to be displayed occasionally and be seen by thousands—and to embark on a risky journey around the world that would take one hundred years to complete.

 

 

Given the fragility of birds' eggs, it is not surprising that only about thirty-six whole, or partially whole, moa eggs are currently known. Many are imperfect, with a large section or several smaller sections missing. Others have been reconstructed, sometimes poorly and inaccurately, from broken fragments found together as an isolated group. Most are ivory-coloured, but there are a few green eggs that were laid by a species of moa in the South Island. Moa eggs range in size from 120 to 240 millimetres long. They have been found at about sixteen sites throughout the North and South Islands and nearly all the eggs are now in publicly owned museum collections, mostly in New Zealand. Thirteen are from archaeological sites—graves or middens—but most are from natural sites: alluvial deposits, mudflows, swamps, sand dunes and rock shelters.

George Fyffe kept the Kaikoura egg, with the Māori skull and adze head, in a candle box, until a visitor suggested it would be safer to keep the heavy stone adze head separately. By now the egg was attracting considerable attention. The ornithologist Walter Buller stated that it had been submitted to him for examination “soon after its exhumation”. Charles Clifford, a politician and speaker of the House of Representatives, had accidentally broken off a bit while handling it.

By September 1864 the egg had been taken on the schooner
Ruby
to Wellington. There Fyffe allowed it to be displayed in the offices of Messrs. Bethune and Hunter, auctioneers and shipping agents. It was shown—damaged side down—in a box made of New Zealand wood, with a small drawer beneath to hold the broken fragments. From January 12 to May 6, 1865, Fyffe exhibited the egg in the same box at the New Zealand Exhibition in Dunedin, where it was in the Wellington Court as exhibition item 220. This event was the first of the big exhibitions held in New Zealand to showcase the colony's natural resources and its agricultural and manufactured products. During its one hundred and two days it attracted more than 30,000 visitors.

The
Ravenscraig
, a fast sailing ship of 800 tonnes, was in Wellington Harbour in late May 1865 to collect cabin passengers and make up the last of its consignment of wool bound for Britain. On Queen's Birthday holiday all public offices closed, private businesses halted, and the ships in the harbour displayed their best bunting. At noon the
Ravenscraig
fired the royal salute. When the ship finally left Wellington on June 21, 1865, it carried not just wool and passengers but also the Kaikoura egg—sent, presumably by Fyffe, for sale in London.

 

 

With Captain D. B. Inglis in command, the
Ravenscraig
headed east for Cape Horn. There were gales and on July 3 the ship encountered a tremendous sea that swept its deck and did much damage. On July 14, in the Southern Ocean near the Cape, the second officer James Faddie fell overboard and was drowned. Fortunately the Kaikoura egg survived, and after the ship called at Pernambuco in Brazil the egg arrived safely in London in the middle of October. It was said to have been insured for £2000.

On November 24 at two in the afternoon, after having been examined by the great comparative anatomist Richard Owen, the egg was put up for auction at Stevens' Rooms, 38 King Street, Covent Garden. Owen's contribution to New Zealand's natural history had already been significant: in 1839 he had correctly deduced the presence of gigantic flightless birds in New Zealand from examination of a section of a thigh bone.

An ornithologist, George Dawson Rowley, bid 100 guineas for the egg but the vendor wanted £200. After negotiating for three years, Rowley finally acquired it for £100. Meanwhile George Fyffe had died after falling from a jetty at Kaikoura.

The egg was kept at Rowley's ornithological museum at Chichester House in Brighton's East Cliff. A large lithographed image was published in the third volume of Rowley's 1878 book
Ornithological Miscellany
and repeated in Richard Owen's
Memoirs on the Extinct Wingless Birds of New Zealand
the following year.

Large eggs are difficult objects to measure—I have used special forestry callipers made for measuring tree diameters at chest height. Contemporary newspaper accounts put the moa egg at between nine and ten inches long and seven inches wide. The nine and a half by seven inches (241 × 178 millimetres) of one newspaper story was fairly accurate. Owen's book confused matters by incorrectly stating that the egg was ten by seven and a half inches (254 × 191 millimetres).

George Dawson Rowley died in 1878. An obituary in
Nature
noted that “he sank in his fifty-seventh year, dying, by a singular coincidence, on the very same day as his father, who had long been an invalid”.

In 1886 the fame of the Kaikoura egg was boosted by its display in the New Zealand Court of the spectacular Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London. The event showcased natural products, manufactures and local objects and curiosities from the territories of the British Empire to encourage trade among them and foster cultural ties. The exhibition catalogue listed the moa egg after a “Native Chief's Carved Wooden Mere” and before maps from the New Zealand Mines Department. The exhibitor was given as G. T. Rowley of Morcott Hall, Uppingham, so the egg was apparently still in the family's possession and in central England.

 

 

The Kaikoura egg now disappeared from view for eighty years, until in 1966 Mr R. A. Pratt, a New Zealander resident in Surrey, wrote to the Dominion Museum on behalf of the egg's current owner to ascertain if the museum had any interest in it. Robert Falla, soon to retire as director of the museum, was in London on other matters and began negotiations.

The egg was in the possession of E. G. James of London, who had recently been left it in the will of a former neighbour, Captain Vivian Hewitt of Anglesey in Wales. Mr James was willing to sell the egg and keen for it to go to a New Zealand museum. The Dominion Museum paid the modest sum of £300, which was remitted through the Official Secretary at New Zealand House in London. For at least one night Falla had the egg in his room at the Regent Palace Hotel in Piccadilly Circus. An expert in the palaeontology department of the British Museum (Natural History) then repaired and strengthened the egg for travel, and it seems to have been forwarded to Wellington by fragile air freight, the original wooden case and loose fragments coming later by sea.

In Wellington, the egg was given the accession number 1966/220 and displayed for a while in the museum's foyer as a new acquisition. Initially it was in the zoology collections, where it bore the fossil collection number S.965. Later it was transferred to the Māori collections as ME12748. A cast of the egg, provenance unknown, is held by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

Having survived chance rediscovery by pickaxe, a perilous sea voyage to Britain, an auction, sale, and subsequent chequered history, the Kaikoura egg was finally safe in public ownership, a treasure for Māori culture and New Zealand archaeology and one of New Zealand's greatest zoological gems.

Its travels, however, were not yet over. In 1983 it was lent to Canterbury Museum in Christchurch to complement a temporary exhibition of archaeological items excavated in the 1970s from the Fyffe site at Kaikoura, and on Queen's Birthday weekend in 1986 it returned to Kaikoura to be displayed briefly at the Kaikoura Museum, and at Fyffe House where it had been found.

 

 

In the early 2000s I began a project to examine all known whole moa eggs in New Zealand museums and compile an annotated list, giving measurements and other details. With much anticipation I contemplated seeing the Kaikoura egg at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa
—the
successor to the Dominion Museum. Approval was withheld for seven months for cultural reasons but at last, in the new museum building on the Wellington waterfront, I was shown into a small room and came face-to-face with the legendary Kaikoura egg.