Dreaming of Moas

Strange stories of strange birds and even stranger fossils were coming from the end of the world during the 19th century.

The first Europeans spotted New Zealand in 1769 and Captain Cook explored the Northern Island four years later. Cook was very interested in natural history and collected tales about the fauna and flora from the locals. 

On the Northern Island nothing unusual was reported, however on the Southern Island legends involving a monstrous bird existed. These legends explain an unusual hunting method for a large bird. Hunters would use incandescent rocks, which swallowed by the bird would then burn it from inside. The preferred habitat of these birds was said to be the swamps and forests and according to some legends until 1800 they were very rare animals, but still living on the island.

In the year 1823 a hunter named Meurat claimed to have found a bone with flesh attached to it. He assumed by the apparent good preservation that the remains were very recent. 

Joel Polack, a trader who lived along the eastern coast of the Northern Island, records that during a forced stop of his ship in the Tolaga Bay in 1838 he had been shown “several large fossil ossifications” found near Mount Hikurangi by the Maori in the winter of 1834. He was certain that these were the bones of a species of emu or ostrich, adding in his report that “the Natives add that in times long past they received the traditions that very large birds had existed, but the scarcity of animal food, as well as the easy method of entrapping them, has caused their extermination“. Polack further noted that he had received reports from Maori that a “species of Struthio” still existed in remote parts of the Southern Island.

The German naturalist and geologist Ernst Dieffenbach also refers to a fossil from the area near Mt. Hikurangi and reports that it belongs to “a bird, now extinct, called Moa* (or Movie**) by the natives”. He continues “On questioning the natives, as I usually did, relative to the natural history of their country, I heard a curious tradition connected with the totara-tree in the neighbourhood. Near this tree they said their forefathers killed the last moa. From the few remains of the moa that have been found it has been declared by Mr. Richard Owen to be a struthious bird of large size."

Read the whole fascinating piece by David Bressan over at his Scientific American blog. You'll be surprised where this story ends up!

Moa exhibition impresses the experts

A combination of team work, community funding and a Waimate archeologist skilled in the field of skeletons and anatomy, has meant the town has a moa exhibition that has impressed some of New Zealand's moa research elite.

The Waimate Historical Museum exhibition which runs until November, received a visit from a group of top moa experts, including from Te Papa, who were on their way to a key moa site at St Bathans. Intending to stay only five minutes, instead they stayed 90.

The exhibition is special to Waimate because of the Kapua moa excavations of 1895. Kapua, at one end of the Waimate gorge, was the resting place of 800 moa skeletons.

English archaeologist, Joy Langston, who now lives in Waimate, was charged with using her expertise to help create the exhibition.

She said the Kapua moa site was initially discovered by a farmer, a Mr MacDonald, who was digging a sink hole for water. He told Captain Frederick W Hutton, the curator of Christchurch Museum(as it was called), who put the museum taxidermist in charge of the dig.

"They literally just dug a hole to bring as many bones out as they could. Excavations then weren't scientifically done."

Local workmen helped.

Beside the dig were heaps of bones rather than sets of complete birds, but the bones amounted to 800 birds.

There is a kill and butchery site at the Waitaki mouth, but the Kapua birds had all died naturally, over several generations.

The Kapua swamp was a feeding area dotted with spring holes connected to a ground water supply.

Unlucky Moa grazing across the swamp, where vegetation covered the holes, would fall leg and bottom first into a hole, and be unable to lever themselves out, being wingless.

They would die, and after the birds decomposed, the bones would fall down the spring hole. The birds at Kapua have been dated from 1014-714BC.

"It wasn't a mass `let's walk on to the swamp and kill ourselves', it happened over a long long time," Dr Langston said.

The exhibition team, with the help of Dr Langston and her scientific research expertise and contacts, are presenting some of the latest research.

Wikipedia has the number of moa species at 11, but researchers now know that there were nine, adapted to different environments such as the swamp, the uplands, the forest or the coast and climates as differing as the West Coast from the East.

Dr Langston said early researchers believed the skeletons of the male and female, with the latter being somewhat larger than her mate, belonged to different species. But with access to DNA testing, the science world has been able to accurately pinpoint the different species.


The different habitats of the moa meant they evolved differently, with the upland species being smaller, with feathers down to their toes for instance, or the stout legged moa suited to forest living.

South America (rhea), Africa (ostrich), Australia (emu and cassowary) and Madagascar (elephant bird – extinct) all have or had large flightless birds called ratites, of which the moa is one. The kiwi is also a ratite.

Interestingly the moa is genetically more closely related to the South American tinamou than it is to the kiwi.

Although moa are unique to New Zealand, indications are that the ancestor ratite bird was living when ancient continent Gondwana was one land mass, and well-distributed throughout, Dr Langston said.

All this suggests the ancestor moa was on New Zealand when it drifted away 86 million years ago, but with New Zealand having been submerged in water and going through ice ages, the fossil evidence dates back about 20 million years.

The oldest moa bones date back only two million years, but the work at St Bathans revealed the older fossil evidence.

When the Southern Alps formed five to eight million years ago, the different habitats created meant the moa evolved into the nine different species.

Dr Langston said the ability to get ancient DNA samples has revolutionised science for humans and "all sorts of species".

Moa have no evidence of ever having had wings – unlike the kiwi which has tiny wing bones. Researchers have been able to work out that centuries old feathers have not faded and moa were probably shades of brown like the kiwi. Some had a a speckled appearance and others had streaking. With barbless feathers they were probably quite shaggy, rather than smoothly preened.

Their only predator before Maori arrived was the haast eagle, which could have a wing span of more than three metres, and which crushed bone with its powerful talons, she said.

However, after Maori arrived (in 1280 according to a 2010 carbon dating of campfire charcoal), it took only a few generations of human habitation, until 1400, for moa to become extinct.

Dr Langston said there were thought to be around 160,000 moa in New Zealand at the time Maori arrived (a figure based on scientific modelling).

Being a K species, long-lived and bearing a small number of young at a later age, they were also vulnerable to extinction. Humans and elephants are other K species.

The giant birds, naive about humans, were a good package of easy meat to a hunter. Big adults were hunted out first, cutting out the breeders. Younger ones followed, before they could breed. Moa eggs were also being eaten.

Interestingly, museums all over the world still have moa skeletons posed with their necks stretching straight up. Now knowing more about anatomy and bones, researchers know their necks curved horizontally, in line with their backs.

The exhibition features a bone from the Kapua dig which still has its hand-written metal tag attached. Other items come from museums further afield. The Canterbury Museum's contribution was halted, days before it was to be transported, by the February earthquake. Fortunately, Otago Museum was able to step in.

Moa Beer does its bit for wildlife

It's not quite as rare as its name-sake (pictured above being attached by a giant Haast's Eagle), but Moa Beer is increasing in popularity and destined to enjoy a much wider distribution.

The Kiwi company is already New Zealand's biggest exporter of beer to the US and elsewhere, including Singapore, Denmark, Vietnam, Brazil and Antarctica.

Naturalists might be interested to know every year the company sponsors the Moa Easter Bunny Hunt, held to assist New Zealand farmers plagued by rabbits. The latest event saw nearly 23,000 rabbits killed, plus 979 hares, eight pigs, countless stoats and a goat.

Too late to help out the Moa, but it does make for an impressive beer label.

Rare Moa bone found at Waiheke

It's slightly old news now, but this story demonstrates how sometimes rare and unusual things will literally wash up at your feet!

A beachcombing walk on Onetangi Beach after the first big storm in late January 2011 yielded a rare find for young Waiheke Primary student Chris Anderson.

The seven-year-old discovered what turned out to be the lower leg bone of a small moa among the huge number of horse mussels washed up on the beach.

Chris says that at first he thought it was a dog bone, then after showing it to his dad Scott, they decided it was something much more special.

“I used to work in a butcher’s shop and I’ve done a bit of hunting, so I’m familiar with animal bones,” says Scott, “and I’d never seen a bone with three toes like that before.”

Thinking it could belong to a moa, the family immediately raced back home and Googled ‘moas’ on the internet, where the images they saw confirmed their hopes.

“We saw a picture of a bone that looked exactly like ours,” says Scott. To be doubly sure, they emailed an image of the bone to the Auckland Museum and had the find authenticated by the curator of birds, Brian Gill.

“It’s a lower leg bone [tarsometatarsus] from one of the smaller moas [about a metre and a half tall] possibly the little bush moa or coastal moa. The edges are badly worn which fits in with it being tumbled in the surf,” says Mr Gill.

Mr Gill’s specialist field is naturally found bird bones in sites like swamps and caves as opposed to midden bones, which would have been hunted, eaten and discarded.

He says Auckland doesn’t have a lot of natural situations like caves and crevices where rare bones would be found, making this a very interesting discovery.

“I think we [at the museum] have about 15 from the Manukau Harbour and South Auckland area and about six from the North Shore. I can’t recall ever receiving moa bones from the Hauraki Gulf.”

He estimates that the bone would be at least 500 or 600 years old. “Assuming that Maori have been in New Zealand about 750 years, it is generally thought that moas disappeared quite quickly after their arrival due to hunting and habitat destruction.”

He says that certainly by the time of Captain James Cook and the subsequent sealers and whalers, there is no substantial evidence of moas existing in New Zealand, in spite of some rumours to the contrary over the years.

The Auckland Museum already has a large moa bone collection, curated by the late Sir Gilbert Archie, containing between 800 and 900 different groups of bones.

However it is always keen to obtain more and while at this stage the Andersons are keeping their rare find, Mr Gill says the museum would be keen to add it to their collection in the future.

• Moa facts

There were eleven species of moa, the extinct flightless bird that was native to New Zealand. The two largest species reached about 3.7 metres in height with neck outstretched and weighed about 230kgs.
Moas were the dominant herbivores in the New Zealand forest, shrub land and sub-alpine ecosystems for thousands of years and until the arrival of Maori, were hunted only by the (also now extinct) Haast’s Eagle.