Ah, the Moa.
New Zealand’s poster child for going extinct, these big-boned birds have left a legacy that outweighs even their own plump rumps. Although they’ve long since left the land of the long white cloud, you can still find quite a fair bit about how they lived in Aotearoa – and how they made their exit.
Moas have been pushing up daisies since 1445, unsurprisingly following the arrival of homo sapiens around 100 years earlier. To be fair on the humans, Moa had been terrorized by a predator called the Haast Eagle for years – albeit they managed to avoid wiping them off the earth altogether. Plus looking like an oversized chicken is a particularly unhelpful trait when it comes to avoiding someone’s dinner table. Oversized here being the key-word, as since ditching the wings and air they had the luxury of becoming ginormous. The largest members of the family could reach 3.6 metres, and could weigh more than 230 kilograms which is about half of a horse (horse unavailable for comment). Interestingly, although they were impressive beasts – the Moa don’t get to enjoy being the largest birds ever. That title falls to the long extinct Elephant bird, which was also over 3 metres – but the big kicker was their weight which could exceed 500 kilograms. Ironically, the closest living relative of the Elephant bird is the well-known and loved Kiwi of Aotearoa – a trait most assume lies with the Moa. Despite both being two of NZ’s most famous fauna, the Moa and Kiwi aren’t actually as closely related as we’d assumed. In fact, the Moa’s closest living relative is actually the Tinamous. This species’s relationship seems almost absurd, as the Tinamous is a small bird from South America and can actually fly to boot. Even though they’ve long since passed, the Moa’s legacy continues to both amaze and baffle us to this day.
A re-creation of a Moa hunt in the 1900s, with a fake Moa as ironically they’d been hunted to extinction centuries earlier.
10/10 – Kudos for being well known and loved despite being long gone, RIP you beautiful turkey.