The Owl That Fell from the Sky by Brian Gill

small-town amateur affair to a fully fledged Edwardian museum suited to a small but growing colonial city. In 1867, Frederick Hutton, the museum’s honorary curator, had contacted Julius von Haast at Canterbury Museum concerning a possible exchange of specimens. “The Museum here,” he wrote, “is such a wretchedly poor one that it will be impossible for me to send you anything at all equal to the value of your Moa bones for some time to come.” Cheeseman changed all that.
    He was primarily a botanist. There was no university in New Zealand when he was young so he taught himself: his Manual of the New Zealand Flora , first published in 1906, was one of his greatest botanical accomplishments. He also seemed to handle non-botanical curatorial requirements with ease, presiding over the development of diverse natural history collections and the museum’s early acquisitions in what are today world-class collections of Māori and Pacific ethnology.
    Under Cheeseman’s guidance the bird and mammal collections grew steadily; today many specimens still bear his accurate handwritten labels. He started a numbered register of land vertebrates, which listed for each specimen the registration number, species, date received, place of origin and donor. This “blue book” remains the starting point for the documentation of most of the museum’s early specimens. For some entries the date column is simply annotated “In Mus. 1874”, hinting that record-keeping was poor before Cheeseman came on the scene.
    He was an energetic correspondent, writing regularly overseas and within New Zealand to arrange large exchanges of specimens which would rapidly develop the museum’s collections. New Zealand birds were a popular currency in international exchanges, and Cheeseman needed to acquire surplus specimens. At times he was able to purchase prepared bird skins from collectors or dealers such as W. Hawkins and Sigvard Dannefaerd, who both collected in the Chatham Islands, and William Smyth, a commercial taxidermist in Caversham, Dunedin, but this option was expensive and thus severely limited by the museum’s perennially straitened circumstances. Up to 1908, a common refrain in the Annual Report was that the museum could not afford to employ a taxidermist.
    With necessity the mother of invention, Cheeseman enlisted his own family in a solution to the taxidermy problem. His younger brother William Joseph, a building contractor, was handy with a gun and seems to have had an interest in and aptitude for shooting birds. Over several decades he shot hundreds, with a peak around 1880 when he was in his twenties, and passed them to his brother for the museum.
    But how could the birds be processed into stable skins? The Cheeseman men had three sisters, Emma, Ellen and Clara. The family was well off and the sisters were free to fill their days with pursuits such as embroidery, sketching and painting. Emma, the eldest sister, either volunteered or was persuaded to take up taxidermy, which she mastered well, producing tidy study-skins with the legs neatly crossed and the heads of the longest-billed birds turned to one side. To a leg of each bird Thomas Cheeseman tied a label in his neat copperplate writing. Where Willie was the collector, the label was annotated “W. J. C.”. On the backs of many labels, someone else, perhaps Emma herself, wrote “E. C.” in pencil, presumably to note the birds she had prepared.
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    Interested in Cheeseman’s large international exchanges, I studied the correspondence he carried out with Enrico Giglioli, director of the natural history museum in Florence, Italy. There are fifty-two known letters from at least sixty-three that the men exchanged between 1877 and 1904. These delightfully written letters give a detailed account of the exchanges and the attendant issues and concerns. In time, despite the slow postal service, high cost of freight,