Overview
Sound engineer and musician Bevan Smith worked with Te Papa staff to recreate the dawn chorus in Te Papa's Blood, Earth, Fire – Whāngai, Whenua, Ahi Kā exhibition. The soundscape they created is how dawn might have sounded at a forest’s edge shortly before people arrived in Aotearoa New Zealand. It includes the calls of five extinct birds, one of which is the stout-legged moa.
How do you go about recreating the call of a bird that no one has seen or heard in hundreds of years? One of the first things to do is identify its closest living relative and how it sounds. In the case of the moa, this is the cassowary, an ostrich-sized bird that lives in northern Australia and Papua New Guinea. This bird has a breathy, low moan, and it’s reasonable to guess that the moa’s call may have sounded similar.
Because the cassowary’s forest habitat is also likely to be quite similar to what the moa’s was, reasonable assumptions about calling behaviour can also be made. Like the cassowary, the moa probably made lots of repetitions to ensure that its message was heard through dense vegetation.
Then the shape and length of the trachea (windpipe) of the moa was taken into account. How would this alter the bird’s ‘voice’? One trachea found in the skeleton of a moa measured a metre along the neck, with another metre looping through its body. This anatomical arrangement is similar to swans and some other groups of birds. The longer the windpipe, the deeper the call. Various sounds were played through long tubes to simulate this attribute of the moa.
After all the scientific knowledge was applied, the subject experts listened to various calls for one that had the right ‘feel’. Some sounded too reptilian. Others made the animal sound too big or too small. Finally, agreement was reached on a call that was probably as close as it could be. Of course, no one will ever know for sure exactly how the moa sounded.
Text originally published in Tai Awatea, Te Papa's onfloor multimedia database (2006)