The Owl That Fell from the Sky Read Online Free PDF

dry study-skin by skinning it, meticulously cleaning and de-fatting the inside of the skin and the remaining attached bones (skull, and outermost wing and leg bones), replacing the separated body with an artificial form of the same shape and size, and sewing the skin back together along the incision lines. After drying and labelling it joined 5,000 other bird skins in Auckland Museum’s collection, a testament to the important role of the public in reporting unusual finds.
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    As a postscript to this story, in April 2008 a pair of barn owls were found breeding in farmland near Kaitaia in New Zealand’s far north. The birds were thought to be unassisted vagrants, most likely from Australia. If a population establishes, it will represent the barn owl’s colonisation of one of its last unoccupied corners of the world.
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The Kaikoura moa egg
    One day, probably some time between about 650 and 750 years ago—during the earliest period of Māori settlement of New Zealand—somebody collected an egg from a nest of a South Island giant moa, Dinornis robustus . Female giant moa, much larger than their mates, reached three metres tall in an upright standing position, making them the tallest known birds. (The ostrich, the tallest living bird, stands about 2.5 metres tall.) The largest giant moa are estimated to have weighed well over 240 kilograms and had neck vertebrae almost as big as a horse’s, although other extinct birds—such as Australia’s mihirungs, or giant runners, and Madagascar’s elephant birds—were heavier.
    The giant egg was not an easy thing to carry home: it was 240 millimetres long, 178 millimetres wide and weighed about four kilograms.
    Exercising great skill and care, someone in the family group then used a stone drill-point, rotated by the string in a bow, to make a small round hole about ten millimetres in diameter at the pole of the moa egg’s narrower end. What a meal was had: the contents of the giant egg were the equivalent of at least five dozen hens’ eggs. But the reason for the great care in opening the egg was that the empty perforated shell made a handy container with a liquid capacity of nearly four litres—a prized possession in a society with no pottery or glass.
    Time passed and someone in the Kaikoura settlement where the egg had been collected, or received in trade, died. As was customary, a moa egg—in this case the egg in question—was placed in the grave beside the dead person. The body rested in peace for about 500 years with the egg beside it. Then one day in 1857 a workman was digging foundations for a building close to George Fyffe’s house at the whaling station on the northern side of the Kaikoura Peninsula. At each swing of the pick into the ground the workman expected the usual resistance. Then he hit something hollow and stopped. Crouching down to scrape away loose soil and rubble he found that his pick had pierced a large egg and broken away one side of it. A human skeleton, a black stone adze head and other artefacts were at the same spot.
    The Kaikoura egg was the first whole moa egg found following European settlement, and larger than any other egg found since. It was destined to excite much interest, to be displayed occasionally and be seen by thousands—and to embark on a risky journey around the world that would take one hundred years to complete.
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    Given the fragility of birds’ eggs, it is not surprising that only about thirty-six whole, or partially whole, moa eggs are currently known. Many are imperfect, with a large section or several smaller sections missing. Others have been reconstructed, sometimes poorly and inaccurately, from broken fragments found together as an isolated group. Most are ivory-coloured, but there are a few green eggs that were laid by a species of moa in the South Island. Moa eggs range in size from 120 to 240 millimetres long. They have been found at