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I knew that I was looking on a cemetery of elephants, the place where these great beasts went to die, as I have since been told the extinct moas did in New Zealand. All my life as a hunter had I heard rumours of these cemeteries, but never before did I see such a spot even in a dream. See! There was one dying now, a huge gaunt bull that looked as though it were several hundred years old.
He called his companions, and in spite of their fatigue, the Major, Robert, and he set off on the track of these animals. His curiosity was excusable, for he had recognized, or thought he had recognized, these birds as "moas" belonging to the species of "dinornis," which many naturalists class with the extinct birds. This, if Paganel was right, would confirm the opinion of Dr.
After a few minutes of chase, these fleet-footed moas disappeared among the tall trees, and the sportsmen lost their powder and their pains. That evening, March 1, Glenarvan and his companions, emerging at last from the immense kauri-forest, camped at the foot of Mount Ikirangi, whose summit rose five thousand five hundred feet into the air.
It must have been a convincing kind of kick. If a person had his back to the bird and did not see who it was that did it, he would think he had been kicked by a wind-mill. There must have been a sufficiency of moas in the old forgotten days when his breed walked the earth. His bones are found in vast masses, all crammed together in huge graves. They are not in caves, but in the ground.
It was not one of the destructive proliferous rats of the northern hemisphere. The Maoris hunted the big birds the Moas and others for their flesh, and ate their eggs, and it is probable that they caused or accelerated the extinction of the Moa and two or three other birds. In the north island they nearly exterminated the white heron, the plumes being valued by them.
One of the eggs rolled gently in its place; then the other. A faint crackling noise was heard, first from one, then from the other egg. From each emerged the featherless head of a fowl the species hitherto unknown to the American continent. The necks pushed forth, then the shoulders, then both shells rolled away in fragments, and the spectators gazed on two fledgling Moas.
The identity of Jones Harvey remains a puzzle to the learned. The classical authority on the Berbalangs is still the paper by Mr. Skertchley in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. The evidence of Captain Funkal is rejected as 'marine. Te-iki-pa decided to remain in New York as custodian of the Moas.
They are very strange wingless birds, about the size of a large Dorking fowl. The Kiwis are still in existence, but the Moas and some of the other flightless birds have died out since the arrival of the Maori man, who killed and ate them.
The gigantic, wingless Moas allied to the ostrich and the cassawary had grown up there, and were the masters of the situation. There were many species of these one of great height one fourth taller than the biggest known ostrich; others with short legs of monstrous thickness and strength. Allied to these are the four species of Kiwi or apteryx, still existing there.
Hochstetter and other travelers on the present existence of the wingless giants of New Zealand. These moas which Paganel was chasing, the contemporaries of the Megatherium and the Pterodactyles, must have been eighteen feet high. They were huge ostriches, timid too, for they fled with extreme rapidity. But no shot could stay their course.
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