The Huia & Our Tears Fabled Birds in the Studios of Ray Ching

About this book

"I never did see huia foraging about on the trunk of a tall tree fern, but I knew a man who had."
– Ray Ching, 2024

The beautiful forest-dwelling huia, presumed extinct for these hundred or more years, holds a special place in the affections of New Zealanders. The old forests are silent now to the call of these beautiful birds, the male with its strong, sharp beak, she with her beak so gracefully curved. Left with us now are just the study-skins collected in museums, some radio-recorded whistles remembered, and the diaries and letters kept from those who left just before us, who had seen for themselves this prince of the forest.

The Huia & Our Tears is Ray Ching’s memoir of these birds in his studio in the 1960s, their specimen skins and feathers, and his meeting and conversations with the man who had trapped and taken them from their secret valley some fifty years earlier, the last of their kind.

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Biography

Born in New Zealand in 1939, Ray Ching began exhibiting his bird paintings in the 1960s, which attracted the attention of English publisher Sir William Collins. A keen ornithologist, Collins invited Ching to the UK, which led to a commission to produce a major book with Collins Publishing and The Readers Digest on all of the birds of Britain. The Reader’s Digest Book of British Birds, published in 1969, became the world’s most successful and biggest-selling ornithological book ever.

This enthusiastic reception established his career as an artist at the top of his field, and also encouraged him to produce many natural history books over the last 40 years. His works are held in collections all over the world. In 2012, Ching was commissioned by his friend Sir David Attenborough to produce an oil painting for the cover of Attenborough’s book Drawn from Paradise. Ray Ching lives in Wiltshire, UK, and continues to paint birds and animals, as well as remarkably life-like portraits.