The Huia & Our Tears

The beautiful forest-dwelling huia, presumed extinct these hundred or more years, hold a special place in the affections of New Zealanders.

The old forests are silent now to the call of these beautiful birds, the male with its strong sharp beak, she with her beak so gracefully curved. Left with us now are just the study-skins collected in museums, some radio-recorded whistles remembered and the diaries and letters kept from those who left just before us who had seen for themselves this prince of the forest.

The Huia & Our Tears is Ray Ching’s memoir of these birds in his studio in the 1960’s, their specimen skins and feathers, and his meeting and conversations with the man who had trapped and taken them from their secret valley some fifty years earlier, the last of their kind.

I never did see huia foraging about on the trunk of a tall tree fern, but I knew a man who had.
Ray Ching, 2024