WHITNEY EXPEDITION

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 93, 13 January 1939, Page 8

WHITNEY EXPEDITION

Conduct In New Zealand In

1926 Defended

TAKING OF NATIVE BIRDS / Dominion Special Service. AUCKLAND, January 12. Objection to a statement made on Wednesday by Captain E. V. Sanderson, president of the Forest and Bird Protection Society, about the visit to New Zealand undertaken 12 years ago by an expedition from the American Museum of Natural History was taken by Mr. R. A. Falla, director of the Canterbury Museum, who is visiting Auckland. A party from the Museum of Natural History is shortly to visit New Zealand to secure specimens and moving-picture records of the country’s big-game fish, and Mr. Sanderson criticized the conduct of the last expedition. “Captain Sanderson has taken the Impending arrival of the 1939 expedition as an occasion for making a public statement of his suspicions as to the intentions of this expedition, and a misleading account of an expedition from the same institution 12 years ago,” said Mr. Falla. “Mr. M. H. Tisdall has replied sufficiently on behalf of the big-game fishing expedition now on the way here, but the insinuations made by Captain Sanderson as to the conduct of the Whitney Expedition of 1926 must not pass unchallenged. “It is suggested that there was an attempt to deceive the public as to the intentions of that expedition. Captain Sanderson does not specifically say whether the deception was the work of the American Museum or of the New Zealand Government and his indirect method of statement leaves a reflection on both. “I do not challenge Captain Sanderson’s figures, but I protest against his use of the phrases, ‘terrible toll of New Zealand birds, including some very rare species.’ “A permit for some 840 specimens of 92 species was issued by responsible Government officers and the great majority of the birds listed were oceanic petrels, many of which are as numerous as the mutton bird, which we allow to be killed annually to the number of hundreds of thousands and still do not fear a decrease in the total for the next year.

“If the thousands of petrels taken annually for food are negligible,” said Mr. Falla, “some hundreds collected at intervals for museurn specimens are as nothing. Rare species for which permits were given in 1926 were for the most’ part rare only in the sense of being restricted to small sub-Antarctic islands, mid they have all been found to be just as plentiful in these localities now as natural conditions permit. "As for the conduct of the Whitney expedition, its collecting aims were clearly stated and known, and no deliberate attempt was made to disguise its purpose. In the matter of formal supervision it is clear that the weather was responsible for the expedition’s schooner not being able to make Stewart Island to.--pick up a Government officer as arranged, and in consequent the ship finally put into Auckland, where the whole of the collection was open to inspection. Such facts should be known, in addition to the few Captain Sanderson has seen fit to state. “It should be a matter for congratulation that the Amerioati Museum of Natural History is prepared to devote some of its display to New Zealand features and to oceanic life generally, and discourteous suspicions are to be deplored.”