56 lines
1.8 KiB
Markdown
56 lines
1.8 KiB
Markdown
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# Huia
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Huia is an experimental programming language that you probably don't want to
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know about.
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## Extinction of the Huia
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Melodious as its Māori name, the gentle Huia bird
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seems a fowl lost from an ancient bestiary.
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Always in pairs, their life one long low liquid interchange,
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they rarely flew, but hopped and probed in deepest thickets
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preening and balancing, antiphonal.
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They fed upon the luscious huhu grub
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under mossed and lichened podocarps
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— fed and hopped so lovingly together
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that if a Māori noosed one bird, its mate would come to hand.
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Working together, joint custodians, His straight crow-bar beak
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and Her thin curving probe, utterly unlike, conjoined
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to wingle out tree-eating grubs.
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Never widespread or numerous, their superb sober
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plumes made mourning-wear for centuries
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until Cook visited. The stuffed ones soon
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were 'musts' for lounge-rooms, though few knew
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how well their natures fitted these strange bills.
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Charmed by his captive pair,
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Buller records how native know-how and the foreign gun
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took in 600 skins from a week's work
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— most of the world's remaining stock:
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'Now safely on the increase'. A common bird today
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in Auckland's antique shops, its loving notes
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that ranged from purest whistles to what seemed
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a puppy's whining call, are gone, lost,
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all before the age of tapes and films.
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The bird remains supreme in words
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of those who loved and stuffed it.
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And our museum has one — that is,
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of course, a pair.
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— by Mark O'Connor.
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## Contributing
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1. Fork it ( https://gitlab.com/jimsy/huia/fork )
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2. Create your feature branch (`git checkout -b my-new-feature`)
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3. Commit your changes (`git commit -am 'Add some feature'`)
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4. Push to the branch (`git push origin my-new-feature`)
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5. Create a new Pull Request
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