The Owl That Fell from the Sky by Brian Gill Page B

balcony—thick with leafy vines—that looked out on the enclosed museum garden.
    The bird specimens were brought to me in batches from storage. I particularly wanted to see any rare species, and I also wondered if there were any Cheeseman family birds. There were several: I saw at once that Willie’s shooting and Emma’s stuffing had helped fuel the Florence exchanges. I particularly remember a nice study-skin of a reef heron, one of New Zealand’s native water-birds. Cheeseman’s writing on the original label showed it had been collected in Auckland’s Orakei Basin on March 4, 1879. The letters “W. J. C.” told me who the collector had been and the preparator was signified by “E. C.” on the reverse.
    It was good to see proof that the New Zealand birds had made the journey across the globe. The earliest ones had gone from Auckland by sailing ship, probably the barque Alastor . They had then survived the turmoil of one hundred and twenty years of Italian history, during which time fascists came to power and were driven from power and a monarchy gave way to a republic. In August 1944, while the birds sat in the museum’s ornithological collection, New Zealand Army units had entered a liberated Florence during the Italian campaign.
    On the final afternoon I saw the special galleries for which the museum is famous. They contain innumerable eighteenth-century wax models of human anatomy prepared for medical teaching. The detail and accuracy of these virtual dissections was staggering. After an hour of peering closely at every inch of the human body from inside and out, I needed fresh air. I retreated to the Boboli Gardens next to the museum for some final views of Florence and the rolling Tuscan hillsides, and contemplated the extraordinary and enduring legacy of Thomas Cheeseman.
    Â 

The Duke of Genoa’s black-thighed falconet
    Among the thousands of study-skins of birds arranged on trays in the cupboards of the land vertebrates storeroom at Auckland Museum there are many foreign birds. Most of these birds, which are exotically shaped and coloured in comparison to the local species, are from exchanges carried out in the late 1800s; the original labels, tied with fine string to the birds’ legs, are annotated in the loveliest of handwritings.
    It was many years before I began to understand the wealth of history bound up with these old skins. Seven birds are annotated as coming from Malacca in the Malay Peninsula. All have the same simple paper labels, which have been cut from lined sheets. In 2001 I asked an Italian intern at the museum to translate the expression “Da S. A. R. il Duca di Genova” that appeared at the bottom of each label. Of course, it means “From H. R. H. the Duke of Genoa”. I began a correspondence with Carlo Violani at the University of Pavia; Violani had published papers on Italian historical bird collections and was able to give me information on these and other specimens.
    Although the birds were from Malacca, it turned out that the skins had been purchased in Singapore in July 1879 by members of an expedition to the Far East on the Italian corvette Vettor Pisani . The two-year expedition was led by Prince Tommaso of Savoy, the second Duke of Genoa and nephew of the king of Italy.
    Back in Italy, the birds that had been gathered were studied by Tommaso Salvadori, an Italian count, and Enrico Giglioli, the director of the natural history museum in Florence. Together they published an account of them in 1888. When the birds had been studied, some became “duplicates” available for exchange, and Giglioli included these seven in a consignment sent that year to Thomas Cheeseman, curator of Auckland Museum.
    One of the Duke of Genoa’s bird skins is a black-thighed falconet, Microhierax fringillarius . This bird is about the size of a house sparrow, and at a passing glance you could mistake the skin for that of an