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title: Extinction of the Huia
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![Huia. by larrywkoester on Flickr](/images/huiaphoto2.jpg)

> Melodious as its Māori name, the gentle Huia bird
> seems a fowl lost from an ancient bestiary.
>
> Always in pairs, their life one long low liquid interchange,
> they rarely flew, but hopped and probed in deepest thickets
> preening and balancing, antiphonal.
>
> They fed upon the luscious huhu grub
> under mossed and lichened podocarps
> — fed and hopped so lovingly together
> that if a Māori noosed one bird, its mate would come to hand.
>
> Working together, joint custodians, His straight crow-bar beak
> and Her thin curving probe, utterly unlike, conjoined
> to wingle out tree-eating grubs.
>
> Never widespread or numerous, their superb sober
> plumes made mourning-wear for centuries
> until Cook visited.  The stuffed ones soon
> were 'musts' for lounge-rooms, though few knew
> how well their natures fitted these strange bills.
>
> Charmed by his captive pair,
> Buller records how native know-how and the foreign gun
> took in 600 skins from a week's work
> — most of the world's remaining stock:
> 'Now safely on the increase'. A common bird today
> in Auckland's antique shops, its loving notes
> that ranged from purest whistles to what seemed
> a puppy's whining call, are gone, lost,
> all before the age of tapes and films.
> The bird remains supreme in words
> of those who loved and stuffed it.
>
> And our museum has one — that is,
> of course, a pair.
>
>   — by [Mark O'Connor](https://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/o-connor-mark/extinction-of-the-huia-0161057).