MUSEUM EXPEDITIONS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23706, 13 January 1939, Page 11

MUSEUM EXPEDITIONS

CAPTAIN SANDERSON'S ALARM ACCUSED OF MISSTATEMENTS (Special to Daily Times) ■vv ; . AUCKLAND, Jan. 12. Objection to the statement made on Wednesday by Captain E,. V. Sander r son. president of the Forest and Biro Protection Society, about the visit to New Zealand undertaken 12 years ago by 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 moying picture records of the country’s big game fish and Captain Sanderson criticised thconduct 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 giving a misleading account of an expedition from the same institution 12 years ago.” Mr Falla said. 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,” Mr Falla said “.that there was an attempt to deceive the public as to the intentions of that expedition. Captain Sanderson does not specifically say whether the deration was the work of the American Museum or of the New Zealand Gov-r-nment. and his indirect method of ; atement leaves a reflection on both I do not challenge Captain Sander- ! -n’s figures, but I protest against his v*e of the phrase ‘terrible toll of New Zealand birds, including some very : ere species.’ A permit for some 840 soecimens 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. If thousands of petrels taken annually for food are negligible, some hundreds collected at interyals for •museum specimens are as nothing. The 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, and 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.” Mr Falla added, “ its collecting aims were clearly stated and known, and no deliberate attempt was made to disguise its purpose.