The Owl That Fell from the Sky Read Online Free PDF Page B

about sixteen sites throughout the North and South Islands and nearly all the eggs are now in publicly owned museum collections, mostly in New Zealand. Thirteen are from archaeological sites—graves or middens—but most are from natural sites: alluvial deposits, mudflows, swamps, sand dunes and rock shelters.
    George Fyffe kept the Kaikoura egg, with the Māori skull and adze head, in a candle box, until a visitor suggested it would be safer to keep the heavy stone adze head separately. By now the egg was attracting considerable attention. The ornithologist Walter Buller stated that it had been submitted to him for examination “soon after its exhumation”. Charles Clifford, a politician and speaker of the House of Representatives, had accidentally broken off a bit while handling it.
    By September 1864 the egg had been taken on the schooner Ruby to Wellington. There Fyffe allowed it to be displayed in the offices of Messrs. Bethune and Hunter, auctioneers and shipping agents. It was shown—damaged side down—in a box made of New Zealand wood, with a small drawer beneath to hold the broken fragments. From January 12 to May 6, 1865, Fyffe exhibited the egg in the same box at the New Zealand Exhibition in Dunedin, where it was in the Wellington Court as exhibition item 220. This event was the first of the big exhibitions held in New Zealand to showcase the colony’s natural resources and its agricultural and manufactured products. During its one hundred and two days it attracted more than 30,000 visitors.
    The Ravenscraig , a fast sailing ship of 800 tonnes, was in Wellington Harbour in late May 1865 to collect cabin passengers and make up the last of its consignment of wool bound for Britain. On Queen’s Birthday holiday all public offices closed, private businesses halted, and the ships in the harbour displayed their best bunting. At noon the Ravenscraig fired the royal salute. When the ship finally left Wellington on June 21, 1865, it carried not just wool and passengers but also the Kaikoura egg—sent, presumably by Fyffe, for sale in London.
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    With Captain D. B. Inglis in command, the Ravenscraig headed east for Cape Horn. There were gales and on July 3 the ship encountered a tremendous sea that swept its deck and did much damage. On July 14, in the Southern Ocean near the Cape, the second officer James Faddie fell overboard and was drowned. Fortunately the Kaikoura egg survived, and after the ship called at Pernambuco in Brazil the egg arrived safely in London in the middle of October. It was said to have been insured for £2000.
    On November 24 at two in the afternoon, after having been examined by the great comparative anatomist Richard Owen, the egg was put up for auction at Stevens’ Rooms, 38 King Street, Covent Garden. Owen’s contribution to New Zealand’s natural history had already been significant: in 1839 he had correctly deduced the presence of gigantic flightless birds in New Zealand from examination of a section of a thigh bone.
    An ornithologist, George Dawson Rowley, bid 100 guineas for the egg but the vendor wanted £200. After negotiating for three years, Rowley finally acquired it for £100. Meanwhile George Fyffe had died after falling from a jetty at Kaikoura.
    The egg was kept at Rowley’s ornithological museum at Chichester House in Brighton’s East Cliff. A large lithographed image was published in the third volume of Rowley’s 1878 book Ornithological Miscellany and repeated in Richard Owen’s Memoirs on the Extinct Wingless Birds of New Zealand the following year.
    Large eggs are difficult objects to measure—I have used special forestry callipers made for measuring tree diameters at chest height. Contemporary newspaper accounts put the moa egg at between nine and ten inches long and seven inches wide. The nine and a half by seven inches (241 × 178 millimetres) of one newspaper story was fairly accurate.