Maori legend of man-eating bird is true
9:58AM Monday Sep 14, 2009
By Paul Rodgers
A Maori legend about a giant, man-eating bird has been confirmed by scientists.
Te Hokioi was a huge black-and-white predator with a red crest and yellow-green tinged wingtips, in an account given to Sir George Gray, an early governor of New Zealand.
It was said to be named after its cry and to have "raced the hawk to the heavens".
"It was certainly capable of swooping down and taking a child," said Paul Scofield, the curator of vertebrate zoology at the Canterbury Museum.
"They had the ability to not only strike with their talons but to close the talons and put them through quite solid objects such as a pelvis. It was designed as a killing machine."
Its main prey would have been moa, flightless birds which grew to as much as 250kg and 2.5 metres tall.
"In some fossil sites, moa bones have been found with signs of eagle predation," Dr Scofield said.
New Zealand has no native land mammals because it became isolated from other continents in the Cretaceous, more than 65 million years ago.
As a result, birds filled niches usually populated by large mammals such as deer and cattle.
"Haast's eagle wasn't just the equivalent of a giant predatory bird," said Dr Scofield. "It was the equivalent of a lion."
The eagle is thought to have died out after the arrival, 1000 years ago, of humans, who exterminated the giant moa.
The latest study shows it was a recent immigrant to the islands, related to the little eagle (
Aquila morphnoides) an Australian bird weighing less than 1kg.
Remains of Haast's eagles are rare because there never were many.
They lived only on the South Island, with probably not more than 1000 breeding pairs at any one time.
- INDEPENDENT
Maori Legend of Man-Eating Bird is True
Originally Posted by optid
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