Huia

Huia is an experimental programming language that you probably don't want to know about.

Extinction of the Huia

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.

Contributing

1. Fork it ( https://gitlab.com/jimsy/huia/fork )
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request