New Zealand Huia
Extinction of the huia (Heteralocha acutirostris) in 1907 was a tragic loss to New Zealand's ancient native avifauna. It serves as a reminder of the importance of bird protection. While today we are astounded by the ruthless hunting of huia to extinction during a very short period, and the ignorance of the time, even amongst respected ornithologists, we are left with no excuse for more bird losses with current knowledge of the value of biodiversity. The huia was probably New Zealand's most eccentric bird. It was a large 48 cm (19 inch) black bird with a bright orange "wattle" at the base of an ivory beak. It had a distinguishing wide band of white at the end of its long tail feathers. Huia were so sexually dimorphic, and unique because of the different beak forms of the male and female, that they were at first thought to be separate species. They were normally found feeding in pairs. In cooperative roles, the male used his short strong beak, which resembled the beak of a starling, to break up rotting tree trunks in search of huhu bugs and other insects. The female used her long curved beak, which was like a nectar feeder's, to reach into otherwise unreachable places. A Rotorua ranger, William Cobeldick, spotted a huia pair near Lake Waikareiti, and a lone huia at Taharua Stream in the Urewera National Park in 1924, but it had been declared extinct many years before this. The wattlebirds of New Zealand are not found anywhere else in the world, and the huia was unique as the only bird in the world with completely different beak forms in the male and female. The ancient Callaeidae family flew to New Zealand 60 million years ago, and like many of the birds in the isolated archipelago, huia adopted ground feeding habits in an ecology devoid of mammals.