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They're Here!
- Thread starter Rugbypup
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Too late, between this and that bloody Chupcabra video, I'm not coming out from beind the sofa.
Skull Mason
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c'mon that one is old check the disclosure thread. And for your information, they've been here...
Mr. Snakey
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You're going to let all that bother you when you have a three foot tall man-eating eagle in your very recent past? Even today, people occasionally report seeing what the Maori named pouakai, which could sweep out of the sky with giant talons wide open to grab and disembowel its human prey while it was still alive. Chupacabras and aliens are nothing compared to that.
Makes me shudder. They most frequently went after children and women but preferred their natural prey, the moa. New Zealand is relatively unique in the world because there were no large mammals to act as top predators and so birds grew to enormous sizes, filling the niche. There were many species of moa ranging in size from of common songbirds all the way to massive 16-feet tall giants. Unfortunately for the moa, when the Maori arrived in New Zealand about 1,000 years ago, the moa had no natural fear of them and they were promptly slaughtered for food. The other death knell came from the rats who accompanied the Maori and sought out moa eggs to eat. The moa laid eggs on the ground and did not protect them as they evolved with no need to do so.
The Maori though, weren't the first predators to think the moa a yummy meal. While New Zealand didn't have mammal predators, it did have raptors. As the moa grew to gigantic sizes, so did their predators. The pouakai, known in the west as Haast's Eagle (Harpagornis moorei), was the largest of the predatory birds in New Zealand and one of the largest in the world to fly. It was about half again as large as the largest eagle known today, the harpy. The pouakai had a short wingspan, merely two meters or so, but it had a very large body. The pouakai would wait in the treetops, usually trying to keep the sun at its back so it could sweep down from behind the sun and attack its prey. Not limited just to open plains, the pouakai was very happy to hunt in dense forests as well.
When the Maori arrived they were stunned to find all these plump docile moas wandering around but even more stunned to find that there were killer birds of prey just as willing to attack them as the moa. The more moa the Maori killed, the more the pouakai were driven to prey on the Maori themselves.
Now New Zealand is very large place and always sparsely populated. It is punctuated with dramatic landscapes ranging from the subtropical to the near arctic. From time to time, people have reported seeing giant (and small) moas though they have been supposedly extinct for the last several hundred years. The pouakai may be alive as well with occasional reports of enormous eagles, most from the south island.
Of all the giant birds to have disappeared from history, the moa is the one most likely to have survived into modern times.
The pouakai is, however, not the largest flying predatory bird to have ever lived. It's a mere fledgling compared Argentavis magnificens, which may have had a wingspan of up to 40 feet and approximated the size of a Cessna 152. The few bones of Argentavis have come from juveniles so no one is terribly sure how large they got. Argentavis is from South America and while it has been considered long dead, once again questions arise if it doesn't have some cousins living in the United States who gave birth to the legend of the thunderbirds. In 1977, 11 year old, 80 lb, Marlon Lowe of Lawndale, Illinois was attacked by a pair of giant flying birds and carried about 45 feet before witnesses managed to drive the birds away. There is no known bird capable of lifting 80 lbs. of anything. Reports of these birds are very similar and range from the Black Forest area of Pennsylvania to Southern Texas.
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