Look at how handsome he is. This is another New Zealand bird. His cry sounded like “a series of dismal shrieks frequently repeated”, or, alternately, as “a peculiar laughing cry, uttered with a descending scale of notes”. No one is really sure what happened to the Laughing Owl; by the time European naturalists starting paying attention to it it was…
Tag: paper
Huia
From New Zealand. The Maori prized their feathers and wore them in battle. They made jewelry, amulets and carved boxes especially to hold Huia feathers. They gave them to each other as tokens of friendship and of respect, and used them in funeral rites. At first only powerful chiefs were allowed to wear their feathers, but soon after the Europeans…
Ohahu O’O
John Zorn named an album after this guy. They were a kind of honeyeater. Not much is known about them. Their plumage was used in robes for the Hawaiian nobility. They were native to O‘ahu and disappeared around 1837. Thirty percent of all known recently extinct birds in the world were originally from Hawaii. 70 percent of all native bird species in the…