Whole huia expected to sell for less than a single feather at Webb’s auction in Auckland next week
A complete taxidermied huia, one of New Zealand’s most evocative extinct birds, will go under the hammer at Webb’s Auction House in Auckland on Monday with a price guide that sits well below what a single huia feather fetched two years ago.
Webb’s has placed a conservative estimate of $20,000 to $40,000 on the specimen, which has been in private hands for generations. In May 2024 a single huia feather sold at the same auction house for a world record $46,521.50, more than fifteen times its $2,000 to $3,000 pre-sale guide, according to RNZ. The contrast has caused some surprise but also a kind of grim humour, with the auction house acknowledging that whole birds simply do not come up for sale often enough to set a reliable market.
Leah Morris, head of decorative arts at Webb’s, told RNZ the vendor had inherited the specimen and now believed it was time to pass it to a new caretaker. “The vendor has inherited through descent and now he feels it’s time to give it to a new kaitiaki to look after it,” she said, framing the sale in the language of guardianship rather than ownership.
For Māori the huia was taonga of the highest order. Only rangatira were permitted to wear the bird’s striking white-tipped tail feathers, and the feathers were stored in elaborately carved waka huia, ornamental boxes that take their name from the bird itself. Heirloom feathers passed between generations as marks of mana. When royal interest in the bird turned into a fashion craze the consequences were devastating. After the future King George V, then Duke of York, was photographed wearing a huia feather in his hatband on a visit to Rotorua in 1901, demand from European collectors and wealthy tourists exploded. Within a few years a single feather could fetch what an unskilled worker earned in a month.
The huia was already in trouble by then. The bird lived in mature lowland and montane forest in the lower North Island, much of which had been steadily cleared for farming since European settlement. It was a slow flier, easily caught, and demonstrated one of the most dramatic cases of sexual dimorphism known in birds. The female had a long curved bill that she used to extract huhu grubs and other larvae from rotting wood, while the male had a shorter, sturdier bill better suited to chiselling decaying timber. Pairs worked together, and the loss of one almost always meant the loss of the other.
The last confirmed sighting was on 28 December 1907 in the Tararua Range, when ornithologist W.W. Smith reported three birds, although there are unverified accounts from the early 1920s in the hills behind Wellington. A late and largely ineffective protection regime had been introduced in 1892 but enforcement was almost non-existent, and the trade in skins and feathers continued well into the new century. By the time it was clear the bird was gone, museums and private collectors held the only remaining huia in the world.
The auction sits at an awkward intersection of conservation memory, fine art commerce and New Zealand law. Trade in huia material is regulated under the Wildlife Act 1953 and the Protected Objects Act 1975, and Webb’s has confirmed the specimen is being sold with the appropriate documentation. New Zealand buyers can compete openly, but anyone wanting to take a huia overseas would need an export permit from Manatū Taonga, the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, and those are rarely granted for items considered nationally significant. In practice, that means the bird is almost certain to remain in the country.
The price gap between feather and bird also says something about how the market values rarity and provenance. The 2024 feather sale was driven by intense bidding from a small group of private buyers who saw a discrete, displayable, almost mythic object. After that sale, Morris said the result reflected “the fragility of our ecosystem and the importance of looking after its fauna,” according to Webb’s own statement at the time. A whole specimen is harder to mount, more expensive to insure, and visibly in a tradition of Victorian taxidermy that fewer collectors find comfortable. The firm priced the bird conservatively, Morris said, precisely because there is so little recent comparison.
Conservationists have used the previous feather auction to talk about the wider lessons of the huia story. New Zealand has lost more than fifty bird species since human arrival, and species such as the kākāpō, kiwi pukupuku and tara iti remain on the edge. Department of Conservation rangers and iwi-led recovery projects continue to work with what the country still has. The huia, by contrast, is a closed file, a reminder that extinction is permanent and that the things we put a price on tomorrow we may not be able to replace at any price.
The auction takes place on Monday 13 May at Webb’s gallery in Mount Eden, Auckland, with online bidding open ahead of the sale. Webb’s has indicated it would not be surprised if the final price exceeds the guide given the public attention the sale has already attracted, but Morris was careful not to set expectations too high. Whole huia, she said, do not come to auction regularly, and there is no obvious benchmark to point to.
What do you think, should taxidermied taonga like the huia be allowed on the open market at all, or kept exclusively in public museums and iwi collections? Have your say in the comments below.