THE MOA BIRD

I will start by telling you the sad part first, which is that the moa is EXTINCT.  But before it was extinct, it was this really big bird that walked around all over New Zealand.  There were actually 11 species of moas, and the very biggest ones were 12 feet tall and weighed more than 500 pounds.  But some of the smaller moa species were only about the size of a turkey.

Moas didn't fly, mainly because they didn't have any wings.  They didn't even have any little flipper things that showed where maybe they used to have wings.  Nope, they were totally and completely wingless.

The moas evolved about 85 million years ago, when New Zealand separated from a big chunk of land called Gondwanaland.  Moas were part of a group of birds called Ratites, which was made up of ostriches, emus, and the elephant bird of Madagascar.  The elephant bird is also extinct now.

Anyway, the moas had a good thing going for them in New Zealand because they hardly had any predators, except for the Giant Haasts Eagle.  And if you are wondering why you never heard of this eagle, it's because it is also extinct, maybe because it ran out of moas to eat.

The only way we have to know about the moa birds is to study their fossil bones and fossil eggs and fossil poop.  Fossilized poop is called coprolites, which is maybe a new word for you, just like it was for me.  So now you know a new word that you can use to impress people next time you go to a party.  But anyway, some of the moa coprolites that have been found are a foot long, which is a really long piece of poop, if you ask me!

Several fossil moa eggs have been found, and the biggest ones are over 9 inches long and 7 inches wide.  Most of the eggs are white, but the upland moa had blue-green eggs.  The eggshells of some species were very thin, so probably the male birds sat on these eggs to keep them warm because males were smaller and lighter than females.  But a lot of eggs still must have got broken.

Moa nests were not very fancy.  They were probably just scratched-out places in the dirt inside caves or under rock shelters, and it is likely that moas didn't nest in colonies.

So anyway, life was pretty much hunky-dory for the moas until the Maori people arrived in New Zealand, which happened in about 1300 A.D.  The Maori found moas to be extremely yummy, so they hunted them a whole bunch, and also they cleared out some of the forests and places where the moas used to live.  So then the moas got to be extinct, probably before any white people even got there to see them.

Except that nobody can agree on exactly when the moa bird went extinct.  In the 1800s, people sometimes said they saw these birds while they were out looking for gold in remote parts of the South Island.  And then there were supposedly some other sightings of moas in 1931, 1960, 1989, and 1990.  And the latest time was in 1993.  Most scientists say the moa is definitely extinct, especially the biggest kind of moa.  They say it's possible that one of the smaller kinds has been living in the forest, and nobody has seen it, but this is not very likely, because there are many hikers and hunters in New Zealand.

I wish the moa wasn't extinct because it would have been really nice to eat a moa egg the other day when it was my birthday.  In fact, I could have eaten part of the same egg for breakfast and supper, and there would still have been enough left to share with my brothers and with Mom and with the cats, too!