Birds
Huia
Heteralocha acutirostris · also called huia
The huia was a glossy blue-black songbird of New Zealand’s North Island forests, and the strangest thing about it was that a male and a female barely looked like the same species from the neck forward. The male had a short, stout, woodpecker-like bill; the female’s was long, thin, and curved like a sickle. No other bird is known to differ so sharply between the sexes. The huia has been extinct since the early twentieth century.
Overview
The huia lived only on the North Island of New Zealand, in old-growth native forest, with its last populations in the island’s southern ranges. It was about 45–50 cm long including a long tail, with blue-black plumage shot with green, a broad white band across the tail tip, and fleshy orange wattles at the base of the bill.
Two bills, one pair
The male’s bill chiselled and levered apart rotten wood; the female’s slender, downcurved bill probed curved tunnels for grubs. Observers described pairs working the same log as a team — the male breaking it open, the female reaching in where he could not — so the mismatched bills may have let a pair take prey that neither could reach alone.
A bird of rank
To Maori the huia was a taonga, a treasure. Its white-tipped tail feathers were worn by people of standing, kept in carved boxes called waka huia, and exchanged as tokens of respect and mourning. The bird runs through proverbs, songs, tribal histories, and place names.
Extinction
The huia was a weak flier that mostly hopped, which left it exposed to introduced rats, stoats, and cats. Forest was cleared for farming. And the bird was hunted hard — for the international fashion in feathers and mounted birds, and for its traditional value — with demand rising further after a 1901 royal visit at which a huia feather was worn. Already rare and confined, it could not survive all of it. The last accepted sighting was in 1907.
Huia: common questions
Why did male and female huia have different beaks?
The huia had the most pronounced difference in bill shape between the sexes of any known bird. The male's bill was short, thick, and fairly straight, suited to attacking solid rotten wood like a small woodpecker, while the female's was long, thin, and curved, suited to probing into winding tunnels that grubs had already bored. The leading explanation is that this let a breeding pair divide the work of finding food, with the male opening up timber and the female extracting prey from deep or curved holes, so that together they could exploit a wider range of the wood-boring insects the forest offered than a pair with identical bills could.
When and why did the huia go extinct?
The last widely accepted sighting was in December 1907, though a few unverified reports continued for another decade or two. Its extinction had several overlapping causes. Large areas of North Island lowland forest were cleared for farming, destroying its habitat. Introduced rats, stoats, and cats preyed on a bird that nested low and travelled largely by hopping. And the huia was hunted heavily, both for the European and colonial fashion for feathers and mounted birds and for the traditional value Maori placed on its tail feathers, with demand spiking further after a widely reported royal visitor wore a huia feather in 1901. A bird that was already rare and restricted could not withstand all of this at once.
What did the huia mean to Maori?
It was a taonga, a treasure, and a bird strongly associated with rank and with respect for the dead. Its glossy black tail feathers, each tipped with a broad band of white, were worn in the hair by chiefs and other people of standing, stored carefully in specially carved boxes called waka huia, and given as gifts to mark friendship, alliance, or grief. The bird appears in proverbs, songs, and tribal histories, and several places on the North Island are named after it. Access to huia and to its feathers was in some areas managed and restricted, reflecting how highly it was valued.
Could the huia ever be brought back?
There is no realistic prospect of it at present. Reviving an extinct species would require a well-preserved genome and a suitable living relative to act as a surrogate, and while many huia skins survive in museums, recovering a complete, high-quality genome from century-old specimens and then reconstructing a functioning bird is far beyond current ability. The huia's closest living relatives, the other New Zealand wattlebirds, are themselves rare. For now the huia exists only as preserved specimens, illustrations, a handful of possibly genuine sound imitations recorded from a man who had heard the bird, and a large place in New Zealand's cultural memory.