The Moa the merrier

[Anonymous]

1993 Moa sighting and photo?

http://jules.org/news-in-brief(8-97).html#moa

In January 1993, three hikers in New Zealand’s Craigieburn Range (west of the city of Christchurch) reportedly saw a roughly 6 foot tall flightless bird. They saw it at a distance of approximately 115 to 130 feet for about 30 seconds and managed to take a grainy photo before it ran off into the forest. They believe it was a moa.

Independent photographic analysis by the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch shows promising results. The analysis confirmed the approximate size and distance by the hikers. The image was blurry, but three-dimensional– a silhouette cut out and a model of a moa had been ruled out.

There had been speculation that an emu or ostrich (both large and non-native birds) could have caused the sighting, but neither are large enough and no escaped emus or ostriches are known on the island. The analysis also ruled out 4 legged animals such as red deer (introduced from Europe) or a llama (possibly escaped). The conclusions were: it was a bird, a very large bird with a thickly feathered “neck” area. Photo analysis of the negative produced no further details.

Anyone else heard of this? Is the actual photo online anywhere, or is this another "Thunderbird Photograph"?

 

[Anonymous]

This photo does exist,but I've never been able to see much of anything in it.There's a small reproduction of it,along with the enhancement,in Vol.11,no.4 of the International Society of Cryptozoology newsletter,but it's pretty bad.

I have seen a larger,supposedly clearer version somewhere,but I can't recall where.

 

[Anonymous]

When I was in New Zealand in 1998, I read somewhere in a local paper there that the two German hikers who had written down their moa sighting in a hut logbook on one of the Great Walks trails, had actually been tracked back to Germany by a local biologist and had, upon questioning, admitted that they had put their sighting down in the hut logbook as a joke...

How's that for a 3rd hand citation as a debunking? Not to mention that two German hikers are now 3 hikers with a camera in your report... Maybe the moa have ghosts too?

 

[Jerry_B]

I think this photo was published in FT too.

 

[Anonymous]

Upon reflection,I think I saw it in FT some years ago.I have back issues going back to about '96,I'll look through them later today.

 

[Mama_Kitty]

It must have been an earlier one, I'm obsessed with moas for no reason and I don't remember seeing a pic in FT, I've been a subscriber since about 1995.

 

[Kondoru]

I wouldnt be suprised if there was a few moa still around. NZ is a pretty wild place.

 

[lopaka]

I wouldnt be suprised if there was a few moa still around. NZ is a pretty wild place.

Don't ever like to simply dismiss possibilities out of hand, but I'm extremely dubious whether that could be so. We're talking about large birds (the smallest species was turkey-sized) that there has been no reliable evidence of extant populations for something like 400 years. The 1800's "sightings" are now generally believed to be bogus. One can always hope, of course.

 

[Anonymous]

I've looked through my back issues of FT and Strange Magazine both and can't find larger,somewhat better version of this photo.I'm sure I did see one somewhere(kind of like the Thunderbird picture).

There are good accounts of this incident,but no picture,in both"Cryptozoology A to Z"by Coleman and Clark and in Karl Shuker's new book"The Beasts That Hide From Man",although I don't know if Dr. Shuker's book is available yet in the UK.

 

[Mighty_Emperor]

Slow growers lose race for survival

Thursday June 16, 2005
The Guardian

The extinction of the giant moas of New Zealand was partly due to the length of time it took for them to reach reproductive maturity, say scientists. The long growth period made them vulnerable when humans first arrived on the island 700 years ago.

Samuel Turvey, of the Institute of Zoology in London, studied bones from the extinct birds, which contain growth rings analogous to those in trees. "Even things like ostrich will get to full adult size in a year so there's not enough time for any kind of seasonal evidence like [rings] to deposit in their bones," he says. "The fact that moas show up to nine growth rings shows that their growth was spectacularly slowed down compared to any of their living survivors."

The largest moas reached 240kg, stood up to 2m tall and had few natural enemies. But that left them in danger when the Maoris got to New Zealand around the 14th century.

www.guardian.co.uk/life/dispatch/story/ ... 52,00.html

 

[Human_84]

Does the picture not exist online somewhere? I'd love to see it!!

 

[TheQuixote]

[...] In January 1993, on the West Coast, three people, Paddy Freaney, Sam Waby and Rochelle Rafferty, claimed to have seen a large bird they suspect was a Moa. They took a picture of it while it ran away, displaying a blurry photograph showing a medium pink-brown horizontal body, a tall erect neck, and a head that may be looking towards the camera. After photo analysis was done, the picture was confirmed as real, but it was said that the subject could be either a large bird or a red deer.
[...]

source

(includes the photo too)

 

[Human_84]

[...] In January 1993, on the West Coast, three people, Paddy Freaney, Sam Waby and Rochelle Rafferty, claimed to have seen a large bird they suspect was a Moa. They took a picture of it while it ran away, displaying a blurry photograph showing a medium pink-brown horizontal body, a tall erect neck, and a head that may be looking towards the camera. After photo analysis was done, the picture was confirmed as real, but it was said that the subject could be either a large bird or a red deer.
[...]

source

(includes the photo too)

Quixote, excellent find!! Very interesting, it does look exactly like the moa models at museums and such. Only other bird that looks awfully similar to the moa (that I can think of from teh top of my head) would be a small chick. (baby chicken)

 

[DougalLongfoot]

While on holiday in New Zealand recently there was an article on their breakfast TV program about a new book on NZ cryptozoology. Unfortunately I only saw the promo and was in the shower when the actual article was on. Any FTMB members from NZ see the article and know the book?

 

[gordonrutter]

While on holiday in New Zealand recently there was an article on their breakfast TV program about a new book on NZ cryptozoology. Unfortunately I only saw the promo and was in the shower when the actual article was on. Any FTMB members from NZ see the article and know the book?

Australian rather than Kiwi but might this be it?
link
It came out on the first of November this year.

Gordon

 

[DougalLongfoot]

Thanks Gordon but no. This book was about NZ phenomena, and definitely mentioned Moa sightings. Might get the Yowie book though. Does it have much more than their previous book Out of the Shadows?

 

[Patrick_Hudson]

I recall the 1993 sighting and photo, and was keenly interested Fortean stuff at the time as I was planning a book myself (life intervened, and now I live in London). Mr Freaney was characterised by everyone I spoke to as a bit of a local joker. My conclusion at the time was "dubious" (still good book fodder, mind).

I would also be surprised if they found any surviving moa. Some parts of NZ are still wild, but nowhere is really that remote.

On the matter of recent crypto books, I don't know of any, but don't really keep up ny more (outside of the pages of FT!) The go-to man for NZ stuff used to be Peter Hassel - does he have a presence here?

Patrick H

 

[ramonmercado]

Some shithot Moa news.

Giant bird feces records pre-human New Zealand
http://www.physorg.com/news150976795.html

January 12th, 2009

(PhysOrg.com) -- A treasure trove of information about pre-human New Zealand has been found in faeces from giant extinct birds, buried beneath the floor of caves and rock shelters for thousands of years.

A team of ancient DNA and palaeontology researchers from the University of Adelaide, University of Otago and the NZ Department of Conservation have published their analyses of plant seeds, leaf fragments and DNA from the dried faeces (coprolites) to start building the first detailed picture of an ecosystem dominated by giant extinct species.

Former PhD student Jamie Wood, from the University of Otago, discovered more than 1500 coprolites in remote areas across southern New Zealand, primarily from species of the extinct giant moa, which ranged up to 250 kilograms and three metres in height. Some of the faeces recovered were up to 15 centimetres in length.

'"Surprisingly for such large birds, over half the plants we detected in the faeces were under 30 centimetres in height," says Dr Wood. "This suggests that some moa grazed on tiny herbs, in contrast to the current view of them as mainly shrub and tree browsers. We also found many plant species that are currently threatened or rare, suggesting that the extinction of the moa has impacted their ability to reproduce or disperse."

"New Zealand offers a unique chance to reconstruct how a 'megafaunal ecosystem' functioned," says Professor Alan Cooper, Director of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, which performed the DNA typing.

"You can't do this elsewhere in the world because the giant species became extinct too long ago, so you don't get such a diverse record of species and habitats. Critically, the interactions between animals and plants we see in the poo provides key information about the origins and background to our current environment, and predicting how it will respond to future climate change and extinctions."

"When animals shelter in caves and rock shelters, they leave faeces which can survive for thousands of years if dried out," Professor Cooper says. "Given the arid conditions, Australia should probably have similar deposits from the extinct giant marsupials. A key question for us is 'where has all the Australian poo gone?' ".

The team's findings have recently been published in Quaternary Science Reviews, an international geological research journal.

Journal: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journa ... escription

Provided by University of Adelaide

 

[ramonmercado]

DNA evidence points to humans for demise of moas
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2 ... yde0fl_vhs
19:00 17 March 2014 by Jeff Hecht

DNA says we are guilty. Early human settlers probably did wipe out the moas of New Zealand. Moa DNA suggests that their population was stable before we turned up.

New Zealand was home to nine species of flightless moa until humans arrived around AD 1300. Within a century, they were all gone. The archaeological record shows humans hunted moas, perhaps to extinction.

But it is hard to separate human impacts on animal populations from other effects such as climate change. Large animals like mammoths also died out when people arrived in the Americas and Australia, which looks suspicious. But a recent study found that Arctic mammoths vanished after a climate-linked shift in vegetation, not because of overhunting.

Morten Allentoft of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and colleagues studied DNA from 281 fossils of four moa species. They found that moa genetic diversity was nearly constant for 3000 years before their extinction, a sign of a stable population. "We can only blame ourselves," says Allentoft.

No long fuse

Allentoft's findings contradict earlier studies by Neil Gemmell at the University of Otago in Mosgiel, New Zealand. In 2004 he studied mitochondrial DNA from moa fossils and found that New Zealand had a moa population of 3 to 12 million between 4000 BC and AD 1000. A separate study had said there were just 159,000 moas when the first humans arrived 300 years later, so Gemmell suggested that something else had depleted moa populations before human hunting.

But those estimates aren't reliable, as DNA isn't a good record of population size, says Allentoft. It is only good for showing trends.

The new study "appears to take care of the 'long fuse' decline in moa species", says Ross MacPhee of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who wasn't involved in either study.

Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1314972111

 

[amyasleigh]

The end of the moas – “hoped-for, versus most-likely”. Ramonmercado’s quote here, tells of latest studies suggesting that it was indeed direct human predation – rather than earlier climatic-or-other factors, leaving relatively few -- that speedily did them in.

Correlation found, to book recently posted-of by me – William Stolzenburg’s “Rat Island”. His scenario in that book, of Polynesians from further north – the Maori, or their predecessors – reaching New Zealand in the 13th century AD, and on getting there, landing theirselves and their dogs and the Pacific rat, brought deliberately as a food species. He “scenarioises” – agreeing with Ramonmercado's cited piece – the extinction of the moas within roughly a century of humans’ getting to New Zealand: direct human predation, plus the Pacific rat (let to roam free and reproduce immediately on reaching NZ, and eager to eat eggs), wiped them out.

As mentioned in previous posts of mine – I find Mr. Stolzenburg an almost-suicide-tempting doom-and-gloom-merchant. In his world, loathsome humankind plus their four-legged friends-and / or parasites, inevitably go viral on any hitherto untouched environment, and comprehensively wreck it. Re NZ, I have to feel that he’s right. Once humans got there, it was curtains for the moas. If the “noble savages, living in harmony with nature, exercising cautious stewardship re the biosphere” thing ever happened, it wasn’t on these particular islands.

 

[ramonmercado]

Maybe the early settlers had big appetites.

A new study suggests that the flightless birds named moa were completely extinct by the time New Zealand's human population had grown to two and half thousand people at most.

The new findings, which appear in the journal Nature Communications, incorporate results of research by international teams involved in two major projects led by Professor Richard Holdaway (Palaecol Research Ltd and University of Canterbury) and Mr Chris Jacomb (University of Otago), respectively.

The researchers calculate that the Polynesians whose activities caused moa extinction in little more than a century had amongst the lowest human population densities on record. They found that during the peak period of moa hunting, there were fewer than 1500 Polynesian settlers in New Zealand, or about 1 person per 100 square kilometres, one of the lowest population densities recorded for any pre-industrial society.

They found that the human population could have reached about 2500 by the time moa went extinct. For several decades before then moa would have been rare luxuries. ...
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 091656.htm

 

[amyasleigh]

Maybe the early settlers had big appetites.

A new study suggests that the flightless birds named moa were completely extinct by the time New Zealand's human population had grown to two and half thousand people at most.

The new findings, which appear in the journal Nature Communications, incorporate results of research by international teams involved in two major projects led by Professor Richard Holdaway (Palaecol Research Ltd and University of Canterbury) and Mr Chris Jacomb (University of Otago), respectively.

The researchers calculate that the Polynesians whose activities caused moa extinction in little more than a century had amongst the lowest human population densities on record. They found that during the peak period of moa hunting, there were fewer than 1500 Polynesian settlers in New Zealand, or about 1 person per 100 square kilometres, one of the lowest population densities recorded for any pre-industrial society.

They found that the human population could have reached about 2500 by the time moa went extinct. For several decades before then moa would have been rare luxuries. ...
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 091656.htm

Greedy bastards... as mentioned earlier in this thread, recent reading has pretty well ruined for me, New Zealand -- which I had hitherto thought of as an "other Eden and demi-paradise".

A sad little verse which I came across long ago, in an NZ-produced slim volume about the demise of the moa species:

No moa, no moa
In old Aotearoa:
Can't get 'em --
They've eat 'em --
They're gone, and there won't be no moa.