The Beasts that Hide from Man (20 page)

This was followed on January 27 by Dunbar’s retraction of his earlier statement, and by Freaney’s announcement that he would personally mount a search for evidence to substantiate the sighting, although he would still be only too happy to offer as much information to the DOC as he could. While all of the deliberations regarding the nature of the sighting were taking place, however, the all-important photograph of the creature itself was being subjected to three days’ worth of computer enhancement analysis by image processing specialists in Canterbury University’s Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. And on January 29, one of these researchers, postgraduate student Kevin Taylor, announced that in his opinion the resulting “de-blurred” version of the photo showed a large bird. Conversely, after examining this, paleoecologist Dr. Richard Holdaway stated that the creature’s neck was too thick to be that of a bird, and that he instead believed it to be a male red deer.

Initially, it may well seem inconceivable that any subject depicted in a photo could be variously identified as creatures so dissimilar from one another as a tall two-legged bird and an antler-bearing four-legged stag! However, as readers had already discovered for themselves when it was reproduced in color by the
Christchurch Press
in its front-page coverage on January 25, the photo’s portrayal of the creature is anything but straightforward. All that can be readily perceived of it is a thickset horizontal body, brown in color, and a sturdy upright neck, bearing what appears to be a head at its uppermost point. On top of, or directly above, the head are some dark horizontal objects, which can be interpreted with an equal degree of success as antlers, branches from the bushes sited immediately to the left of the creature, shadows, or rock formations. As for that most crucial of features—the creature’s number of legs—this is not visible, because the lower portion of its body is completely hidden behind rocks, an obstacle that not even computer enhancement can counter. And the photos allegedly depicting the creature’s wet footprint gained short shrift from both Dr. Holdaway and Canterbury Museum’s moa expert Beverly McCulloch, as they deemed it unlikely that this was the footprint of any type of bird.

Nevertheless, Kevin Taylor remained interested in pursuing the investigation via his own computer enhancement techniques, but this time by directly utilizing the original negatives of Freaney’s photographs. This was permitted by Freaney in early February, but the results were not conclusive. A few days afterwards, Freaney revealed that he would be sending them for computer enhancement to an English university astrophysicist, and had received the promise of part-sponsorship from an anonymous businessman for a planned search for the bird itself later that year. In the meantime, however, some very startling—and extremely unexpected—support for the Freaney trio’s moa claim came to light.

During the second week of February, hiker Bruce Spittle and his son Malcolm Moncrief-Spittle, visiting the Cragieburn area, had stayed at its Bealey Hut accommodation, and while reading through some of the entries in the hut’s intentions (visitors) book had spotted a remarkable entry penned by two German hikers during the previous year. Dated May 19, 1992, it revealed that Franz Christianssen and Hulga Umbreit had spent two days visiting the Cass-Lagoon Saddle area of Harper Valley, and whilst there had been “very surprised to see two moas”! The validity of the entry’s date was duly confirmed by Geoff Goodhew, a Christchurch hiker who had been a member of the party that had made use of the hut just three days after the two Germans. This meant that the Freaney encounter now had a notable precedent—an encounter with alleged moas made in precisely the same location, but eight months
earlier
. Needless to say, Freaney and his two colleagues were delighted and greatly encouraged by this apparent vindication of their claim, but the DOC remained unimpressed, discounting the German report as insufficient evidence for mounting a moa quest.

And there the matter remains for the present time. Nothing further of note has emerged regarding this latest in a long line of reputed moa resurrections—and quite probably nothing will. For myself, although I feel comfortable in accepting the possible existence undetected by science of a surviving species of modest-sized

Megalapteryx
moa in certain of the lesser-explored corners of South Island, the prospect of a viable population of mighty six-foot-tall moas eluding detection in a region as regularly traversed by man as the Craigieburn Range is not one that inspires me with a notable degree of optimism. Of course, scientists were expressing much the same views concerning the brilliantly plumaged takahe
Porphyrio (=Notornis) mantelli
, a flightless relative of the moorhens and gallinules believed extinct since 1899—until it was sensationally rediscovered in December 1948. To be continued…?

Nowadays, the familiar emu
Dromaius novaehollandiae
of mainland Australia is the only type of emu still in existence, but not so long ago it had three dwarf relatives.

Just north of Tasmania is the Bass Strait, containing a small islet known as King Island; and just to the south of Adelaide, South Australia, is another one, called Kangaroo Island. Each one harbored its very own, distinctive species of emu—both of which had been discovered by the Western world in the 19th century’s opening years, only to vanish utterly and irrevocably by the 1830s. Since then, the histories of these two scarcely known, lost species have been inextricably intertwined by a Gordian degree of confusion and contradiction—which only now, in the following account, is finally unraveled.

In 1802, Kangaroo Island was briefly visited by a French naval expedition to Australia, led by Captain Nicholas Baudin, and some living specimens of its endemic emu were taken on board. At least three survived the arduous journey back to France, and two were forwarded to the Empress Josephine; the third survived for a time at Paris’s Jardin des Plantes.

There is no firm record concerning the fate of the first two specimens’ remains after their deaths in 1822—events that most probably marked the extinction of this entire species, because it had died out by then on Kangaroo Island itself too, a consequence of devastating brush fires and hunting. In contrast, the skin of the Jardin des Plantes’ individual was preserved, and survives today in mounted form at Paris’s Natural History Museum. The specimen upon which the Kangaroo Island emu’s scientific description has traditionally been based, this bird had much darker plumage than the Australian emu, alleviated only by its pale face, throat, and back, and was somewhat shorter too—so that its species also became known as the black emu and as the dwarf emu. Several different scientific names have been assigned to it as well, including
Dromaius diemenianus
and D.
ater
, but in terms of confusion these nomenclatural inconsistencies were as nothing compared to the taxonomie turmoil that would ultimately ensue concerning this enigmatic emu.

Within his impressive
Rare and Vanishing Australian Birds
(1978), Peter Sclater pointed out that during its Antipodean travels of 1802 the Baudin-led naval expedition had collected emus not only from Kangaroo Island but also from King Island. This disclosure greatly reduced the significance of the preserved skin from the Jardin des Plantes’ emu, because there are no records that categorically identify from which of these two islands this all-important, unique ornithological specimen had actually been obtained. Consequently, no one could be absolutely certain any longer that it really had been a Kangaroo Island emu. After all, who could guarantee that it was not a King Island emu?

Based as it was, therefore, upon a skin that may not even have been derived from a representative of its own species, the Kangaroo Island emu was facing an acute identity crisis. Its King Island relative, meanwhile, had fortunately avoided this same fate (though not the fate of extinction—by the 1830s it too had been wiped out by a combination of forest fires and hunting). That was because this species had been based upon collections of fossilized emu bones (unearthed from shoreline sand dunes) whose precise localities upon King Island had been fully documented and authenticated within the scientific literature.

Accordingly, in the early 1980s Dr. Shane Parker of the South Australian Museum decided that the best way to deal with the confusion surrounding the Kangaroo Island emu would be to pursue a similar course of action—by rejecting outright the preserved skin as a reliable representative of this species, and by discounting all of the scientific names that the skin had inspired. In their place, he provided a brand-new description of this near-forgotten ratite
(B.B.O.C.
, 1984), based solely upon the structural characteristics of a series of emu bones whose collection upon Kangaroo Island had been precisely recorded by the scientists who had obtained them there. These revealed that this controversial bird had been slightly taller than King Island’s but still much shorter than the surviving emu of mainland Australia.

As for the Kangaroo Island emu’s scientific name, Parker formally changed this to D.
baudinianus
(commemorating Captain Baudin). This new name is particularly welcome, because its two principal predecessors, D.
ater
and D.
diemenianus
, had been responsible for inciting even further chaos concerning this already much-muddled bird. In earlier days, for example, the name D.
ater
had also been applied by some writers to the King Island emu (otherwise referred to as D.
minor)’
, following on from Parker’s paper (and in many other publications since then), this name has now been formally assigned exclusively to the King Island species (thereby replacing D.
minor
as its official scientific name). As for D.
diemenianus
, this is all-too-readily mistaken for
diemenensis
, the subspecific name of the Tasmanian emu, yet another lost form.

Even shorter than the King Island emu, and lacking the Australian species’ characteristic black feathers on the upper reaches of its neck, the Tasmanian emu is known in full as D.
novaehollandiae diemenensis
, and is represented today only by bones and a few complete preserved specimens in various of the world’s major museums. As already mentioned, many ornithologists believe that the emus of Kangaroo Island and King Island were depleted by brush fires, sweeping unchecked across their sea-encircled homes; similar events may have contributed to the decline of their Tasmanian relative too, but there is a rather more insidious factor that also played a notable part in this particular emu’s passing.

Like those on Australia, the emus of Tasmania were greatly prized as game by the gun-toting fraternity present among Western settlers during the early 19th century. But as there were far fewer emus on Tasmania than on the mainland, D.
n. diemenensis
rapidly became very rare. In order, therefore, to provide greater numbers for shooting, emus from Australia were released in Tasmania, which resulted in widespread interbreeding between this island’s native emus and those from Australia. Inevitably, it was not long before virtually all of the emus on Tasmania were either hybrids or purebred Australian specimens—by 1850, if not earlier, the last true Tasmanian emus were gone.

During the 1920s eight Australian emus were released onto Kangaroo Island, the first emus seen here since its own species had died out almost a century before. A few of these interlopers from the mainland were still present in the 1980s.

One of the most controversial ornithological mysteries from Down Under concerns the origin of a gigantic egg that was discovered by rancher’s son Vic Roberts and his friend Chris Morris at Nannup, in the Scott River region of Western Australia’s southernmost tip, in 1930, ensconced among some sand dunes about 500 yards from the sea. An emu, or even a feral ostrich, might seem a feasible explanation for it, until we consider that its diameter was only marginally under one foot, i.e. almost twice that of an average-sized ostrich egg, which is the biggest egg laid by any bird alive today! The other dimensions of this oological monster are equally astonishing—a width of eight and a half inches, a circumference of roughly 26 and a half inches, and a capacity of almost one and a half gallons (i.e. equivalent to about 135 hens’ eggs!). It was eventually presented by Roberts on permanent loan to the Western Australian Museum, where it still resides today, but the identity of the gargantuan bird that must have laid it has puzzled the zoological world for decades.

In 1962, the egg was examined by the widely known Australian naturalist Harry Butler, who accurately pointed out in a later report
(Science Digest
, March 1969) that it most closely compared in size with the enormous eggs produced by the now-extinct aepyornids or elephant birds—from Madagascar!

Comprising a family of uncommonly robust ratites, most species of elephant bird were native to Madagascar or to mainland Africa. Some unexpected proof that the Canary Islands were connected to the African land mass until as recently as 12 million years ago was disclosed by German scientists Drs. E.G. Franz Sauer and Peter Rothe in a
Science
article for April 7, 1972, when they announced that fossil elephant bird (and also ostrich) eggshells dating from the early Pliocene had been found on the island of Lanzarote. Yet despite their relatively wide distribution, all but one species had died out in prehistoric times.

The lone exception, however, was indeed exceptional—for it was the largest elephant bird of all. Appropriately named
Aepyornis maximus
, the great elephant bird, this enormous creature stood more than 10 feet tall and weighed almost 1,000 pounds. It is very likely that it was still alive as recently as the 17th century, because within his
Histoire de la Grande Isle de Madagascar
(1658), Admiral Etienne de Flacourt referred to a giant bird that he called the
vouroupatra
(possibly a misspelling of
vorompatra)
, which was still occasionally reported at that time by the Ampatres (Antandroy) tribe of southern Madagascar. According to de Flacourt, it laid huge eggs like the ostrich’s, and in order to avoid being captured it only inhabited those localities least frequented by man.