Tahiti - Introduced Birds - More Information

Following up my account of Eastham Guild’s introduction of birds to Tahiti, I now have much more information plus an inconsistency.

I found a copy of Carrie Guild’s book, Rainbow in Tahiti, on Amazon.co.uk. The book is the British Empire edition, published in 1951. The US edition was published in 1948. It is a book of its era and gives an account of how the Guilds (pronounced by them to rhyme with ‘wild’) came to travel and settle in Tahiti. A fixed, unearned income went a lot further in Tahiti than in Europe. They acquired land and built a house, Te Anuanua, at Paea, a village on the west coast of Tahiti, on a derelict vanilla plantation. They arrived in Tahiti in 1923 and left after the fall of France as transport across the Pacific became difficult, food supplies became limited and with the threat of the Vichy regime taking over French Polynesia.

I haven’t been able to locate the site of Te Anuanua. Several places, as viewed in Google Earth, fit the clues gleaned from the book. My guess is that it was to the north of the river at Paea where the mountains are closest to the lagoon. The road round the island bisected the property which ran from the beach to the mountains, and the house was built between the mountains and the road. The answer must lie somewhere in the land records in Papeete.

A misleading clue in the Foreword by James Norman Hall (1887-1951, author with Charles Nordhoff of Mutiny on the Bounty, 1932), is that the house was 18 miles from Papeete. Paea is 18 kilometres not miles, from Paea. But the Hall & Nordhoff version of the mutiny on HMAV Bounty is not renowned for its accuracy either.

A whole chapter in the book is devoted to birds and how Eastham Guild first came to release them from his aviary. They eventually released 10,000 birds of 55 species from waxbills and humming birds to pheasants and black swans.

And that’s where the anomaly appears. According to the excellent website of the Société d’Ornithologie de Polynésie (MANU) there are at present 11 introduced species surviving in the [Royal] Society Islands of which Tahiti is one. The Swamp Harrier (Circus approximans) introduced in 1885 in an attempt to control rats appears to have had a devastating effect on the endemic fauna. The Jungle Fowl and Rock Pigeons are feral populations. The Common Myna (Acridotheres tristis) was introduced to combat insects in 1910 and is mentioned in the Guild book. Two species were introduced after the Guilds, the Zebra Dove (Geopelia striata) in the 1950s and the Red-vented Bulbul (Pycnonotus cafer) around 1970. Two introduced species are certainly the result of the Guild releases: Silvereye (Zosterops lateralis) and Crimson-backed Tanager (Ramphocelus dimidiatus). However the MANU website lists the following three species as being introduced before the Guilds arrived: Common Waxbill (Estrilda astrild); Red-browed Firetail (Emblema temporalis) and Chestnut-breasted Mannikin (Lonchura castaneothorax), the first at the beginning of the 20th century, the others at the end of the 19th century. Nevertheless, all three species were released by the Guilds and included in the list of birds which had nested and reared young in the wild. The Guilds in their book and articles make no mention of these species occurring in Tahiti before their releases. That is the anomaly. Did the Guilds add to already-present introduced populations of three species, or are the records of earlier introductions wrong? The view that only two of the species introduced by the Guilds survived has been copied into the scientific literature. I suspect that view is wrong.

The Guilds received many visitors including Dr James Paul Chapin (1889-1964) the noted ornithologist of the American Museum of Natural History:

Although in principle he disagreed with Ham over the introduction of birds from other lands, he finally admitted that the experiment was a noble one and certainly had been a success.

Woburn

Although Tahiti was clearly home base for the Guilds, they travelled widely and became involved with aviculturists throughout the world. A delicious chapter in the book describes a visit to Woburn in 1936 with Alfred Ezra (1872-1955) the wealthy aviculturist (commemorated by a plaque at the entrance to the Bird House at London Zoo) to visit the 11th Duke of Bedford (Herbrand Arthur Russell, 1858-1940), saviour of Père David’s Deer, and his son the Marquess of Tavistock (Hastings William Sackville Russell, 1888-1953) later the 12th Duke. Father and son had only recently been reconciled and Carrie Guild’s description of the argument between them on whether Rolls-Royces or Fords should be used to transport the visitors around the estate, conducted in ‘monosyllabic monotone’, is priceless.

The reason for the visit to Woburn was parrots, for Tavistock had asked the Guilds to collect for him some of the lorikeets or vinis from French Polynesia to add to his large collection. Extinct on Tahiti, it was, and is now further, restricted to other islands of French Polynesia. The Guilds by visiting these islands and arranging collection and transport by others, gathered about sixty birds, mostly Coryphillus [sic][Coriphilus] [Vini] peruvianus [peruviana]’. The mostly is interesting. The others were the Marquesas Lorikeet (V. ultramarina sometimes known as C. smaragdinus). The Guilds brought the vinis by ship through the Panama Canal and then to London, where they were collected by Tavistock’s heated lorry for delivery to his aviaries in Sussex. This trip with birds which feed on nectar was no mean feat with 38 of the 40 birds surviving. The trials and tribulations are described in the book. Tavistock did in fact go on to breed both Vini peruviana and V. ultramarina, reporting his results in Avicultural Magazine in 1938 and 1939.

After the War

I was left wondering whether the Guilds had returned to Tahiti after the war. There is a great deal of information on the movement of individuals in and out of the USA on Ancestry.com. A quick search showed the Guilds arriving from Tahiti at San Francisco on 2 January 1946 on board M/S Thor I. In my searches I had never some across a photograph of Eastham or Carrie. However, the same search showed that US passport applications are in the public domain and have been scanned. Eastham’s passport (a joint application with his then wife Olive Boyd Guild) in 1920 shows his photograph and date of birth (14 April 1889) and does Carrie’s also from 1920. She is shown as a widow, Caroline Heywood, born 12 August 1893. Eastham was in 1920, treasurer of Schmitz & Guild of 110 State Street, Boston. Carrie’s travels before the war were under the name Heywood. Olive Boyd Guild is shown as divorced in the 1930 and 1940 US Censuses; died in 1974 — see below. Was that why Eastham and Carrie were living in the Netherlands in 1922?

The story does not end there though. I find that Olive Boyd Guild bought a piece of land in 1958 which passed to her son Eastham Guild Jr on her death in 1974. Eastham Jr (1915-2007) gave the land to the Kennebec Estuary Land Trust and it is now the Green Point Reserve, West Bath, Maine. The Guild natural history story thus passes from French Polynesia back to New England, leaving in Tahiti the results of an experiment that still excites the interest of ecologists and conservationists while horrifying them at the same time.

Eastham Guild - Passport Application 1920

Caroline Heywood - Passport Application 1920

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NOTE ADDED 24 May 2024

David Bartell has now made a video on the life of Carrie and Eastham Guild entitled
Out Of This World: A Deep Draught into the Woman Who Named the Mai Tai.

References and Links

Guild, Caroline. 1948. Rainbow in Tahiti. Doubleday
Guild, Caroline. 1951. Rainbow in Tahiti. London: Hammond, Hammond

Ecology:
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2462678?uid=3738032&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=21101146718927
http://www4.gu.edu.au:8080/adt-root/uploads/approved/adt-QGU20030915.094001/public/02Whole.pdf
Information on M/S Thor I:
http://www.warsailors.com/singleships/thor1.html
First Breeding Register (Avicultural Society):
http://www.avisoc.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/UK-First-Breeding-Register.pdf
Eastham Guild Jnr:
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/bostonglobe/obituary.aspx?n=eastham-guild-bud&pid=136948858#fbLoggedOut
Green Point Reserve, West Bath Maine:
http://kennebecestuary.org/conserved-lands/green-point-west-bath