History of Walter Buller’s collections of New Zealand birds: Tuhinga 20

Tuhinga 20: 81 - 136

ABSTRACT: In 1871, 310 bird specimens were purchased by the Colonial Museum, Wellington, from the important nineteenth-century New Zealand ornithologist Walter Lawry Buller. This was the first large and representative collection of New Zealand birds obtained by the national museum, and it originally included type specimens of 11 species and 23 specimens of birds that are now extinct. Most of this collection (77%) was lost or destroyed in the nineteenth century, and today only 70 of the specimens have been located, with none having the locality and date of collection on the original label. Professional jealousy and a desire to conceal his sources may have been one reason for Buller’s failure to label his specimens at the start of his career, although laxity in recording specimen data was prevalent in New Zealand at the time. Subsequently, the museum was unable to care for these specimens properly, mainly owing to inadequate provision by the government for the museum and its collections. This contrasts with the professional care given to Buller’s later collections of New Zealand birds by Rothschild’s private museum in England, the American Museum of Natural History and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. The latter two museums each have over 500 New Zealand bird specimens from Walter Buller, and these collections are well documented and still largely intact. Together they provide a precious record of the decline of most New Zealand endemic bird species during the late nineteenth century, which resulted from the introduction of mammalian predators. In this paper, Buller’s collections are used to document the decline and extinction of endemic New Zealand birds. Analysis of the ‘Second’ and ‘Third’ Buller collections showed a decline in the proportion of juveniles of extinct and threatened birds, which may indicate that predation of nests and young, rather than of adults, was a key step in the demise of many New Zealand mainland species. Buller’s assertion that he built up three separate collections of New Zealand birds is shown to be incorrect. Each of these three ‘collections’ was selected from Buller’s own collection, which was not fully disposed of until his death. The number of specimens collected was relatively small, and no evidence was found of Buller’s personal collecting, or collecting on his behalf, significantly impacting on any New Zealand bird species. Nor did Buller profit greatly from the sales of his bird collections.

KEYWORDS: Bird collections, New Zealand, Walter Buller, Colonial Museum, museum history, Walter Rothschild, specimen documentation, bird extinction, predation.