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| Sunday, 29 January 2006 |
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Different outlook Giant Moa by Arefa Tehsin "No moa Yes...they are all gone away.
The Giant Moa was one of the largest birds that our planet has ever seen. Native A native of New Zealand - a land devoid of mammals (except bats) - this herbivorous bird was the largest of 15 species of Moa and reached around 13 feet in height! Since New Zealand did not have any predatory animals, birds reined this land and had adapted to different behaviours, shapes and sizes filling the niches elsewhere filled by mammals. When the Maoris first arrived in New Zealand in the 10th century "what greeted them was an astonishing world that seemed frozen in time. Far more isolated than Madagascar, New Zealand showed how the world had fared over sixty million years before", wrote David Day. These ratites of terrifying size that had little to fear were found in extraordinary numbers and a defence mechanism against the humans was nowhere in the scheme of their millions of years of evolution. Around 700 years ago Maoris (Polynesian people) arrived in this untouched paradise and ate them to extinction. The mythology of Maoris talks of 'Poua-Kai', a colossal bird that destroyed half of the warriors of a great tribe with its immense beak and gigantic talons. Most of the Moa species were extinct by 1500s but the Giant Moa is said to have been around till 1850. Hunt Many methods were used by the aggressive Maoris to hunt the moa. They would surround the moa and since it kicked viciously from one leg, they hit on the other and speared it to bring it down. Or they would ambush them on their trails and spear them on the sides so that while running the spears brushing against the bushes would exhaust them. Thousands of moa bones were discovered in subsequent years from Maori middens (sites of cooking remains), caves and other areas. Eggs were also discovered years after their extinction. A skeleton figure of a Maori chieftain was found at a Maori gravesite at Kaikura in a sitting position with one of the largest eggs of Giant Moa clasped in his hands. The first moa bone reached the west in 1938 by a flax trader at Poverty Bay who passed it on to the renowned palaeontologist Richard Owen. The bone mystified him for 4 long years to establish that this light and honeycombed bone was not of some large animal, but a bird. It took Owen a lot of patience, perseverance and huge quantities of moa bones to convince the scientific community that a bird of such proportions existed. At the sensational discovery of moa, Queen Victoria asked a special report to be written for her own knowledge. Size The females of Giant Moa were 2-3 times larger than males (sexual dimorphism), so big that they were initially classified as a different species. One extraordinary feature of this bird was that this was the only bird in the world, which didn't even have a trace of vestigial wing structure or humeri (upper arm bones). Such was this wonderful bird, which seemed right out of some fairy tale. Its extinction, like hundreds of others, is brutal and appalling. Maoris lamented - "Ka ngraro i te ngraro a te Moa" (Alas, we are 'lost as the Moa is lost') - when their race was faced with war and disease. Moa could not lament, could not remorse, could not defend. They struggled but struggled in vain. Their last breath and last cry faded somewhere unnoticed and uncared for. "These animals are extinct. All their beauty and vitality is lost forever. We can no longer claim to be ignorant of the reasons for their disappearance. Surely the next century need not witness 100 to 1000 more extinctions before the lesson is learned?" - David Day. |
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The bird Giant Moa (pronounced as more), which had evolved over 100
million years, walked the vast semi tropical realm of New Zealand. 
