Buller's Birds of New Zealand was a work of great beauty as well as scientific significance.
Buller's Birds of New Zealand was a work of great beauty as well as scientific significance.
A History of the Birds of New Zealand by Walter Buller was a publishing sensation when it first came out in London, winning praise from Charles Darwin among others.
It was packed with eyecatching paintings by Dutch artist J.G. Keulemans and one London admirer said there was "no other workto place alongside it ... it will call attention to the delightful country which is the dwelling-place of such singular and beautiful objects in natural history".
Colonial pride in the achievement - and its potential as an advertisement for New Zealand's beauty - was prominent in the coverage from the Herald at the time. But, as Te Papa researchers Sandy Bartle and Alan Tennyson point out in their "History of Walter Buller's Collections", the value of Buller's work was so much greater than just pretty pictures.
They use his collections to document the decline and extinction of endemic New Zealand birds in the late 19th century as a result of introduced mammal predators.
One 1873 reviewer used it to criticise the "silly mania" of importing foreign species to New Zealand - and other places - which in some cases drove the native fauna to extinction.
