Was that a Moa I saw?

A miner writes to a New Zealand paper to say that whilst he and his mate were prospecting for gold last autumn, between lake Rotorua and the Cannibal Gorges, in the province of Nelson, he saw what he believed to be the moa. His description is as follows: - 

"We heard a strange screeching noise in a gully about a hundred yards from where we were camped, and went to where the noise proceeded from, and to our surprise we saw two gigantic birds coming towards us. They did not show the least alarm at seeing us, but continued coming to where we were, so we took to our heels. We heard them two or three times that night again.  Having no gun with us we thought it advisable to start the next morning, for fear they would tackle us. One of them was apparently about twelve feet high, and the other somewhat smaller, with feathers resembling the kiwi's."

Hardwicke's Science-Gossip, vol. XV, 1879.

Some people annoying a couple of moas, as imagined by Heinrich Harder (via Wikimedia).

FF Notes:
There were nine species of moa on New Zealand. They were flightless but could kick the arse of most other creatures due to their enormous size. Like the miners claimed, some did get as big as 12 feet tall. But Wikipedia begs to differ on the sound they would have made - at least some had tracheal rings, which are associated with resonating deep calls in extant species of birds.

It's thought that they were all extinct by 1445, hunted by the Maori. They were only 'rediscovered' in the 1830s, when Sir Richard Owen (founder of the Natural History Museum in London) figured out what sort of bone he'd been sent by his Australian uncle.

Sightings persist until very recently. You can read a paper detailing some of them here. 
But it's probably unlikely that they still exist, sadly.

The idea that they could still exist, or people want them to exist, or people want to tell stories about them existing, really interests me. One of my favourite creatures is the thylacine - a similarly beleaguered animal that lived in Australia until its eventual extinction in the 1930s. People are still seeing those stripey marsupials on and off. Sometimes I go to visit a real (albeit dusty) one in Bristol Museum. 

Later in the magazine, a cynic writes that they can't find a Lake Rotorua on the south island of NZ, nor the 'Cannibal Gorge'. But actually they're there, although it's a pretty big area between them. It's nice to think the moas might have been about. But I should get a grip.

Great Auk Eggs

"Two eggs of the extinct great auk were sold at Mr. J.C. Stevens's Auction Rooms, Covent Garden, on June 20th last. One was an unrecorded egg from France, and attained a record price of £330 15s. It is said to be the finest example yet sold in the Stevens Rooms. 

Its length is 5 1/16 inches, though the usual length for these eggs is from 3 3/4 inches to 4 1/2 inches. It is a perfect specimen and of good colour.

The second egg passed through the same rooms in  1894, as recorded in Science-Gossip (vol. i., N.S., p. 75), when it sold for 175 guineas. At the sale of June 20th it reached a price of 180 guineas.

Science-Gossip, vol. VII, 1900-1901.

An illustration of a Great Auk egg by Adolphe Millot, now on Wikimedia Commons.

FF Notes:
This is a sorry example of the sad behaviour of human beings. Great Auks (as you can read about on the NHM website) used to gather in huge numbers off Scotland. Unfortunately they couldn't fly, so people used to find it very easy to catch and kill them when they were on land. They were killed for their flesh, their feathers, their eggs and their greasy auk oil.

So by the early 1800s, they were getting pretty rare. Museums and egg collectors got in on the act too. By the 1850s the species went extinct. It all seems rather unnecessary in retrospect. And we're still doing similar things today.

So when the eggs were sold at the auction house above, the bird had been gone for about 50 years. Yet people still wanted the eggs - for prestige? According to this website, £330 in 1900 would be worth over £36,000 today. For an egg... So this story isn't fortean as such. But the strange human behaviour makes it weirdly interesting.

Today it's a criminal offence to take eggs from the wild, and has been since 1954. But it's also illegal even to possess an egg of a British wild bird. Some years ago at work, we were bequeathed an old egg collection. It was impossible to say how old the eggs were. But although they were probably old enough not to get me sent to prison, I couldn't actually have proved how old they were or where they came from. So I eventually decided to crush them and throw them in the bin.

It was dreadful because they were beautiful and fascinating things. But I couldn't get over how they'd been taken by someone from under the bum of a bird that was trying to breed. Most of them weren't even labelled and it's possible they came from rare species. They had to go.