Category Archives: New Zealand

Episode 032: Some New Zealand birds

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This week’s episode is about several New Zealand birds, from the still-living kiwi to the mmmmmaybe extinct moa! Note: I’m going to start putting a full transcript of each episode in the show notes for those who would like to know what words I’m mispronouncing and for those who may have hearing issues. Transcripts will be below the pictures.

A kiwi:

Superman has fought everything.

The controversial blurry “moa” picture taken by Freaney. Probably not a moa.

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

Before we get started, apologies for my voice. About the time I finally got over the cough I picked up at WorldCon in Finland, I went to DragonCon in Atlanta and got a big juicy cold. Hopefully I don’t sound too gross. My traveling for the year is over so I’m looking forward to having time to really dig into some fun topics for the podcast. In particular, I’m going to be covering some of the creepier strange animals in October, because Halloween is the best. And yes, Bigfoot is going to make an appearance.

This week’s episode is about some amazing birds from New Zealand. We learned about the takahe way back in episode seven, a big silly-looking flightless bird that was once thought extinct until its rediscovery in the middle of the last century. This week we’ll look at some other birds, some of them happily alive, some that are definitely extinct. At least, we’re pretty sure they are.

New Zealand wasn’t settled by humans until the late 13th century, only about 750 years ago. That’s mind-blowing until you take a look at a globe. New Zealand isn’t just a hop skip and jump away from Australia, it’s 900 miles away over open ocean. It’s 600 miles away from the Pacific Islands. That’s a long, long trip to make in a small boat, especially when you’re not sure if there’s any land out that way. But sometime between the years 1250 to 1300, people from eastern Polynesia discovered this new land. They liked it and stayed, and their descendants are now known as the Maori.

I know we’ve been talking about tectonic plates in a number of episodes recently. I haven’t done it on purpose—it’s just part of learning how and why different animals developed in different places. It’s definitely relevant when it comes to New Zealand.

New Zealand is just a little part of an otherwise submerged continent called Zealandia, or sometimes Tasmantis, which I actually prefer. Tasmantis. If Zealandia weren’t mostly under the ocean, it would be about half the size of Australia. Around 90 million years ago Zealandia, Australia, and Antarctica were all part of the supercontinent Gondwana. As Gondwana broke up, Zealandia separated from Antarctica and Australia around 80 million years ago, then slowly sank into the ocean.

After Zealandia separated from Gondwana, a cataclysmic event, probably a humongous meteor strike, led to the extinction of some 85% of the animals on earth. In most of the world, mammals began to evolve like crazy to fill the vacant ecological niches after the dinosaurs died off. But Zealandia didn’t have very many mammals to start with, and by 25 million years ago it was mostly underwater anyway except for the peaks of New Zealand, which were being pushed up slowly by tectonic forces—a process that’s still ongoing.

When travelers from Polynesia first landed on New Zealand, the only mammals on the islands were three species of bat. But there were birds in abundance, from enormous moas and eagles to tiny kiwi. Almost every ecological niche was filled by a bird.

Europeans first visited New Zealand in 1642. It didn’t go well and no one came back until 1769, and after that things got messy and lots of people died from war and introduced diseases. Around the mid-19th century Europeans started moving to New Zealand. Between them, the Maori, and introduced mammals like rats and dogs, a whole lot of birds went extinct.

I just want you to know that it took me hours and hours and hours to research all that stuff about Zealandia. Hopefully I got it right. I’m ready to talk about birds now.

Let’s start with a bird that is so unique to New Zealand that you’ll sometimes hear people call New Zealanders kiwis. There are five species of kiwi, all of them rare and protected. They’re round brown poofs of birds with long legs and long bills, and they eat worms, insects, seeds, fruit, frogs, and other things like that. They prefer to live in forests and usually mate for life, and can live for 50 years.

The kiwi has a lot of unusual characteristics. It’s flightless but has wings less than an inch long hidden under its feathers. Each wing has a tiny claw at its tip that doesn’t seem to have a use. The kiwi has no tail. Unlike every other bird out there, its nostrils are at the tip of its bill. The kiwi has a good sense of smell and may detect worms and other underground prey by smell, which should make you pause and wonder what earthworms smell like. The kiwi also has sensory pits at the tip of its bill that helps it detect vibrations, though, so it’s possible its good sense of smell is less important than researchers previously thought. When a kiwi detects its prey, it stabs its bill into the ground to catch it, which frequently leads to the kiwi later having to snort dirt out of its nostrils. Evolution does what it can, folks, but it’s not perfect.

Since it can’t fly and doesn’t need flight feathers, the kiwi’s feathers are hair-like and downy. But most curious of all is its egg. The kiwi is about the size of a chicken, but its egg is six times the size of a chicken egg and can weigh an entire pound. It’s so big that the female can’t even eat the last few days before she lays the egg. There’s no room in her body for food.

After the female lays her egg, the male incubates it. That huge egg has a huge yolk to feed the baby inside, so when the baby kiwi hatches, it’s ready to go. After a few days it leaves the nest and starts foraging, usually with its dad alongside for the first few weeks. It takes several years for it to grow to adult size.

The kiwi is territorial and will fight other kiwis that stray into its territory. Only its mate and its own offspring are allowed in its territory. It has powerful legs with claws that can inflict quite a bit of damage, and it can run faster than a human.

Scientists used to think the kiwi was closely related to moas, which we’ll talk about in a minute, but DNA studies have determined that its closest relative is the extinct elephant bird of Madagascar—and the elephant bird is the topic for a future episode.

The Maori describe a huge black swan called a Pouwa that lived in the Chatham Islands, but it had already gone extinct by the time Europeans arrived in the area in the late 1700s. Until recently researchers thought it was just the Australian black swan, either a population that lived in New Zealand or the occasional individual that flies across the Tasman Sea. Australian black swans were introduced to New Zealand in the 1860s.

But a recent study of DNA from fossilized swan remains from New Zealand show that it wasn’t the same bird as the Australian black swan but a related species. Around one or two million years ago Australian black swans lived in New Zealand and evolved into a separate species, heavier than the Australian birds with longer legs and shorter wings. It might have been a poor or reluctant flier and might have been on its way to evolving into flightlessness before it was eaten into extinction by the Maori.

The big name in extinct birds of New Zealand is the moa. Nine species of moa are recognized today, although in the past researchers thought there were a lot more. It turns out that female moas of some species were much larger than the males, so much so that scientists once thought they were looking at two different species. Moas were big flightless birds that in shape resembled big flightless birds from other parts of the world, known as ratites, which includes ostriches. Until DNA testing most researchers thought moas were closely related to the ratites of Australia, emus and cassowaries. But no, they are most closely related to a group of birds from Mexico, Central America, and South America collectively called tinamous. Tinamous are a type of ratite, but they can fly. They’re all fairly small and somewhat resemble quail and other game birds that spend a lot of time foraging on the ground.

Moas, however, are big. They are really big. Originally scientists mounted their skeletons so that the neck stuck more or less straight up, but now we know that they held their necks more like ostriches, with a gentle S-shaped curve. Even so, females of the biggest species, the South Island Giant Moa, stood around six and a half feet high at the back. That doesn’t even count the neck. With the neck outstretched, a big female moa could probably reach leaves twelve feet off the ground.

All moas were plant-eaters. Some ate leaves and fruit, others were adapted to digest tougher plant material like twigs, moss, and bark. Unlike other flightless birds, they didn’t have wings at all, not even for display, not even vestigial wings. They just flat-out didn’t have forelimbs. They did have strong legs although they probably couldn’t run very fast, unlike other flightless birds like ostriches. After all, moas didn’t need to run to escape predators. They only had one predator, and that was one they couldn’t outrun: Haast’s eagle.

Haast’s was the biggest eagle that ever lived, although its wings were comparatively short—only around 10 feet wide for big females, closer to 8 ½ feet wide for big males and more average-sized females. Since much of its hunting range was forested, its shorter wings probably helped it maneuver. It had a long tail too. But it had enormous talons with claws over four inches long, and its bill was similarly big. In fact, its talons were so big that its scientific name, Harpagornis moorei, means Moore’s grappling hook bird.

The Haast’s eagle’s prey was the moa, and when moas went extinct after overhunting, the Haast’s eagle went extinct soon after since it just didn’t have anything to eat. It did apparently try to adapt its hunting habits, though. Maori legends tell of the Pouakai, an enormous bird that would sometimes kill humans.

It’s pretty certain that Haast’s eagle is extinct. If it was still around, ranchers would spot it picking off sheep and calves. But the moa is something else. Moa sightings pop up pretty frequently in remote areas of New Zealand.

One of the smallest species of moa, Megalapteryx, also called the upland moa, may have survived on the south island until the mid-19th century. The upland moa was three or four feet tall including the head and neck, and was completely covered with feathers except for its bill and feet, since it lived in the mountainous areas of New Zealand’s south island where the climate was cool. It laid one or two blue-green eggs a year and the male took care of the babies.

Its accepted date of extinction is around the year 1500, but there have been numerous sightings since then. In 1880, Alice McKenzie, who was then seven years old, saw a three-foot-tall bird with blue feathers, dark green scaled legs, and three claws on each foot. She ran to get her father, but when they returned the bird had gone, although it had left big tracks in the sandy soil. She saw the same bird again in 1889.

The problem with this sighting is that the upland moa had feathered legs, and as far as we know no moas had blue plumage. We have plenty of upland moa feathers, which are grey, black and white. We even have mummified upland moa remains. Not only did Alice describe her bird as blue, she specifically noted it was the blue of a pukeko, which has vibrant plumage that varies from navy blue to violet. This wasn’t a grayish-blue bird. Alice herself thought, later in life, that she might have seen a takahe, which is also blue, but after the takahe was rediscovered she went to view some and was disappointed. They have red legs and she knew her bird’s legs were green.

But that’s not the only sighting. In addition to the sporadic accounts of big birds seen in the distance, in 1993 three men hiking in the Craigieburn Range saw what they described as a red-brown and gray moa some six feet high, including its neck. It ran off when it saw them, but one of the men, Paddy Freaney, ran after it and managed to get a photograph. He also got a few pictures of its footprints where it had stepped in a stream and then on a rock.

The picture is frustrating, to say the least. It’s so out of focus that it could be anything. However, I agree with one of the experts who have examined the photo, palaeoecologist Richard Holdaway, who says the figure’s neck is too thick for a moa. He thinks the picture is probably of a red deer. As far as I can find, Freaney’s photos of the footprints haven’t been released.

In 2007, a pair of cryptozoologists searching for moas in the hill country of the North Island spotted 35 footprints and what appeared to be a nest that they claimed were made by a group of moas, possibly a lesser moa. But considering that the pair of cryptozoologists are Rex and Heather Gilroy, who are notorious for being secretive, vague in their claims of evidence, and somewhat paranoid about their findings, I don’t expect them to show up with a live moa anytime soon. No other moa sightings or even rumors of moas living in the area have ever been uncovered.

It’s easy to dismiss this account, and the others, as wishful thinking, misidentification, and in some cases maybe outright hoaxes. Australian emus are raised in some areas of New Zealand and sometimes escape from captivity, too, which confuses the issue, since emus are big flightless birds that could easily be mistaken for moas at a distance. But there is something that makes me hopeful that the moa might still be around, especially one of the smaller species.

New Zealand’s south island is much less populated than its north island. Alice McKenzie’s sighting in 1880 was on her family’s farm near Milford Sound, which is now part of Fiordland National Park. This is a big nature reserve in the southwest corner of the south island, with rugged terrain and very few tracks passable to even offroad vehicles. The park includes the Murchison Mountains, which is where the takahe was rediscovered in 1948 after being thought extinct. So it’s entirely possible that a small species of moa might be hiding in the area. Maybe one day someone will get a really good picture—or better yet, a hiker or park ranger might come across a newly dead moa carcass and can bring it back for study.

We do have some subfossil moa remains that aren’t just skeletons and feathers. Dessicated body parts turn up occasionally, which has helped with DNA testing and our knowledge of what the living birds looked like. The moa is a good candidate for de-extinction by genetic cloning, and it would be really neat to have moas for sure running around in New Zealand again, so scientists can get right on that as far as I’m concerned.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on iTunes or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Pattreon if you’d like to support us that way. Rewards include stickers and twice-monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 020: The Shoebill and Geckos

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We’ve reached the big two-oh! Episode 20 catches us up on listener suggestions.

Crossover University podcast wants to know about geckos and Bearly Ready Broadcast wants to know about the shoe-billed stork! Your wish is my command! Also those are some neato animals.

Behold the majestic shoebill!

12/10 would pet softly:

Pterodactyl-y:

Adorable crested gecko, aka eyelash gecko:

Alain Delcourt and stuffed giant gecko. I bet they both hate this picture:

Further reading:

A page all about the shoebill

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week we have two more listener suggestions. The hosts of Crossover University suggested geckos as a topic because they have a leopard gecko named Lockheed, after the X-Men character, as their podcast mascot. The hosts of Barely Ready podcast want to hear about the shoe billed stork. I’m not sure if they have a pet shoebill as a mascot. Both are awesome fun pop culture podcasts. I’ll put links in the show notes so you can check them out.

The shoebill is commonly called the shoe-billed stork. Originally researchers thought it was related to storks, but DNA analysis shows that it’s actually more closely related to pelicans. I was going to go into details of the confusion about where the bird fits in the avian family tree, but basically it’s just two groups of scientists shouting back and forth, “Storks!” and “Pelicans!” Probably not that interesting to most people.

The shoebill is a big bird, four or even five feet high, mostly due to its long legs. Its wingspan can be almost nine feet. It lives in swampy areas in east central Africa and its toes are really long, which distributes its weight over a large surface so it can stand on floating vegetation without sinking even though it doesn’t have webs between its toes. Its feathers are slate gray and it has a little floofy tuft on the back of its head. But the most memorable part of its appearance is its bill. It’s a great big heavy bill with a hook on the end. It looks like the shoebill could kill crocodiles with that thing, and guess what?

Well, okay, not full-grown crocs, but it will eat baby crocodiles. It also eats lizards, snakes, frogs, small birds and mammals when it can catch them, and lots of fish. It especially likes lungfish and will dig in the mud with its bill to find them.

The shoebill has a reputation as kind of an idiot bird. It spends most of its time creeping up on its prey very, very slowly, but when it attacks, a lot of times it just throws itself at its prey like a maniac. Since the shoebill prefers to live in papyrus and reed swamps, it frequently ends up flailing around in the water, covered in rotten vegetation and mud, with a catfish or whatever swinging from its massive beak. But hey, it works for the shoebill.

The shoebill occasionally does something that is really rare in birds. It sometimes uses its wings to push itself upright after it lunges after prey. This may not sound unusual, but birds almost never use their wings like forelegs or arms.

The shoebill doesn’t like to fly very far, but it certainly can fly and it looks really impressive when it does. In fact, it’s possible that flying shoebills are responsible for the occasional report of living pterodactyls in Africa.

That brings us to the kongamato, a flying cryptid reported from east central Africa and generally identified by cryptozoologists as a type of living pterodactyl. Pterosaurs died out more than 60 million years ago, but that doesn’t stop people from seeing them from time to time. Most likely the sightings are misidentifications of known birds, especially big wading birds like the shoebill. When I was a kid I used to pretend great blue herons flying overhead were pterodactyls.

In 1923, Frank H. Melland published a book called In Witch-Bound Africa, a title that tells you a lot about Mr. Melland. Maybe his publisher made up the title. Anyway, according to Melland, the kongamato was a big reddish or black lizard with batlike wings and a long beak with teeth, which was supposed to overturn boats. The natives, Melland reported gravely, were terrified of it. When shown pictures of animals, he said local people always pointed at the pterodactyl and said it was the kongamato. It was supposed to live along rivers.

Sporadic reports of the kongamato, or at least of pterosaur-like animals, trickled into the press throughout the 1940s and 50s, but no photos have ever been taken and no remains found. Writer Dale Drinnon says that the kongamato was originally reported as a water monster. He suggests that a big stingray of some kind may be the boat-tipping culprit. Since all the information I can find online about the kongamato leads back to Melland’s 1923 book, I’m definitely skeptical about assigning any kind of possible identity to the animal. But I don’t think it’s a pterodactyl.

Shoebills don’t make a lot of noise ordinarily, but they do clatter their bills like pelicans_

Here’s what that sounds like, and then we’ll go on to learn about geckos.

[shoebill clattering bill]

Geckos are gorgeous lizards, ranging in size from about half an inch to over two feet long depending on species. They’re the lizards that can walk up walls and even across ceilings. For a long time scientists weren’t sure how the gecko stuck to surfaces, but recent studies show that most geckos’ toe pads are covered with tiny bristles that actually make the toes into adhesive devices. The gecko doesn’t even have to be alive for it to stick to surfaces. Dead geckos hang on just as securely. The gecko has to be alive to release its hold on the surface, though, helped by a fatty lubricant secreted by the toes that helps the gecko move its foot instead of it being stuck to one place for the rest of its life. Not all geckos have adhesive toe pads. It depends on the species.

Geckos are also the lizards that lick their eyeballs.

Some species can glide using flaps of skin that help keep them aloft when they jump from somewhere high up. Many gecko species have the ability to drop their tails when threatened. The tail detaches from the body and thrashes around while the now-tailless gecko beats feet to safety. The tail will usually grow back, but it’s just a little stumpy tail that can’t be lost a second time.

There is a type of gecko that can lose more than its tail if something tries to grab it. There are a number of fish-scaled geckos that can lose their scales, which are big. If an animal tries to bite a fish-scaled gecko, it’s likely to get a mouthful of scales while the gecko runs off. The scales grow back eventually and can be lost again. A newly-discovered variety of fish-scaled gecko is so good at dropping its scales and growing them back quickly that researchers have trouble catching them without ending up with a bunch of nude and irritated geckos.

There are more than 1,600 species of gecko throughout the warmer areas of the world and more are discovered all the time. There are so many that it’s easy to lose track of some of them. The crested gecko is a handsome little lizard, usually orangey or yellowish in color, with a broad head, tiny claws, and tiny spines that run along its shoulders and above its eyes. The spines above its eyes give it its other name, the eyelash gecko. It was discovered in 1866 in New Caledonia, a group of islands east of Australia, but after a few decades it appeared that the species had gone extinct. Then, in 1994, a German herpetologist out looking for specimens after a tropical storm found a single crested gecko. It turns out that the geckos had been just fine all along. Captive-bred crested geckos are now sold as pets.

Similarly, in 1877 a British naturalist in India discovered the Jeypore ground gecko under a rock. It’s a beautiful lizard, orangey or brown with chocolate brown blotches. But after that first sighting, no one saw the gecko again until a team went looking for it in 2010. They found it, too. Unfortunately, it’s not doing as well as the crested gecko. It’s only found in two small areas that together amount to barely eight square miles, and those areas are in danger of being destroyed due to development and mining. Conservationists are working to increase awareness of the gecko so hopefully its remaining habitat can be protected.

Most geckos are pretty small—no bigger than the length of your hand or thereabouts. But Delcourt’s giant gecko is a whole lot bigger, some two feet long. Unlike the other geckos I’ve talked about, Delcourt’s giant gecko really is extinct—at least, as far as we know. And until 1986, researchers didn’t know it had ever existed. In 1979 a herpetologist named Alain Delcourt, working in the Marseilles Natural History Museum in France, noticed a big taxidermied lizard in storage and wondered what it was. It wasn’t labeled and he didn’t recognize it, surprising since it was brown with red longitudinal stripes and the biggest gecko he’d ever seen. He sent photos to several reptile experts and they didn’t know what it was either. Finally the specimen was examined and in 1986 it was described as a new species.

No one knew anything about the stuffed specimen, including where it was caught. At first researchers thought it might be from New Caledonia since a lot of the museum’s other specimens were collected from the Pacific Islands. None of the specimens donated between 1833 and 1869 had any documentation, so it seemed probable the giant gecko was donated during that time and probably collected not long before.

Finally, researchers decided it was probably native to New Zealand. Not only does it resemble some smaller gecko species found there, the Maori people in New Zealand have local lore about a big lizard called the kawekaweau. The legends were known to Europeans as early as 1777 when Captain Cook interviewed the Maori and collected stories about the kawekaweau. In 1873 a Maori chief told a visiting biologist that he had killed a kawekaweau in 1870, and described it as “about two feet long and as thick as a man’s wrist; colour brown, striped longitudinally with dull red.” That was the last known sighting of the gecko and the last anyone in the scientific community thought about it until the stuffed specimen caught Delcourt’s attention.

I really like this story. It warms my skeptical cryptozoologist’s cold cold heart. Unlike accounts of the kongamato, it has everything a good cryptozoological mystery should have: the remains of an unknown animal, good scientific and historical work, and the support of a scientific hypothesis by local reports. The only way it could be a better story is if Delcourt’s giant gecko aka the kawekaweau was found alive and well in remote areas of New Zealand. It’s not likely, but there are a few reported sightings, so maybe one day a lucky herpetologist will make the discovery of a lifetime.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, give us a rating and review on iTunes or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a PAYtreon if you’d like to support us that way. Rewards include exclusive twice-monthly episodes and stickers.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 007: Strange Birds

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This week we look at three strange birds: a red-tailed Canadian raven that may or may not exist, the pied-billed grebe that definitely does, and New Zealand’s takahē.

A common raven. No red markings:

Here’s the Cryptodominion page with the red-tailed raven report.

Here’s Karl Shuker’s post about the red-tailed raven.

Precious smol baby pied-billed grebes riding on their mom or dad’s back:

The takahē, hooray!

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

For this week’s episode we’ll look at three unusual birds, because birds are awesome. This is a re-record to improve audio quality and bring some information up to date.

It may be a tall tale, but a big red-tailed raven supposedly living in remote areas of British Columbia, Canada sounds oddly plausible. Loggers report that there’s a particular valley where huge ravens exist. They’re bigger than golden eagles but otherwise look like ordinary ravens except for their tails, which are reddish. They’re also nearly flightless. The loggers say the birds can be dangerous and will tear up campsites.

The only known raven found in Canada is the common raven. It’s much bigger and heavier than the crow, over two feet long, or 61 cm, including the tail, with a wingspan of over four feet, or 1.2 meters. The golden eagle, in contrast, can have a wingspan of nearly eight feet, or 2.4 meters, although the body length is not much more that of a raven’s.

The common raven is an intelligent, curious bird, black all over with a purplish sheen in the right light. It’s omnivorous and is happy to eat roadkill, food scraps found in unsecured garbage cans, and the eggs and hatchlings of other birds.

So could there be an unknown raven in British Columbia? I dug around online to see if I could find more details. In fact, I checked Allaboutbirds.com first since that’s a really good resource about North American birds. I wanted to see if there are any corvid species in North America that have red markings, but there aren’t. The only corvid in the world with red markings is the blue magpie, which has a rusty red head and wings. It’s a lovely bird, but it lives in Sri Lanka, and anyway its tail is blue.

I couldn’t find much online at all about the red-tailed raven story. It first appeared in 2012 or shortly before on a site called Cryptodominion. I’ll read the entry in its entirety, since it’s very short.

“British Columbian giant raven (Interior of B.C. NA): A piece of local folklore, the bush mechanics who worked in the interior of B.C. claim that here is a valley, rich in timber, which is populated by enormous raverns bigger than golden eagles. They say these ravens are dangerous animals, very opportunistic, and will not hesitate to tear someones camp apart. they are nearly flightless, and have much red in their tail plumage. These are obviously a specialized species of raven which developed in the isolation of this valley. However, if any introduced predators like dogs or cats make it there these ravens might become threatened.”

I learned about this story from zoologist Karl Shuker’s blog, Shukernature. He says that in 2012 a French reader emailed him asking him if he’d seen the entry and if he knew anything about the bird. He had never heard of the story before. Also in 2012, “The Corvid Enthusiast” posted about the Cryptodominion entry on an unexplained mysteries forum, asking if anyone in British Columbia had heard the story. One person did indicate they’d heard of it but gave no details, so I’m a bit skeptical of that reply. Responses from a few people from British Columbia indicate that the area is too populated and well explored to have any isolated valleys.

British Columbia is an enormous region, from the Pacific coast to the Rocky Mountains, from Vancouver’s mild climate to a northern border with the Yukon. The original entry says the valley is found in the interior of the British Columbia, which I take to mean as not coastal or on an island. I have absolutely no doubt there are pockets of wilderness in B.C. where any number of mystery birds might live.

So do I believe the red-tailed raven is a real bird? No. I think someone planted that story to see how far it would go. But if anyone wants to fund a birding expedition to British Columbia to look for the raven, I am standing by with my binoculars in one hand and my passport in the other.

Our second bird also lives in North America, although it’s just as common in South America and shows up occasionally in Europe and other places. The pied-billed grebe, also called a dabchick, isn’t an especially strange bird, but I’m including it just because I love it. I see them frequently while birding, especially in winter, and they’re so small and brownish-yellow that I frequently mistake them for ducklings at first glance.

They’re about a foot long from bill to tail, or 30 cm, but they sit so low in the water they look smaller. Actually they don’t even really have a tail. They just have some tufty feathers on their hind end.

Grebes aren’t ducks, although they do spend most of their time on the water. They don’t have webbed toes like ducks do. Instead, they have lobed toes but you probably won’t ever see them because grebes don’t like to get out of the water. Their legs are set so far back on their bodies that they don’t balance well while walking. If they have to, they’ll fly, but again, they’d rather just stay on the water. Some populations migrate, especially if they live where ponds freeze in winter, but populations in more temperate climates stay year-round.

They prefer freshwater ponds and small lakes with plenty of cover, like cattails, reeds, and other vegetation. They’re diving waterfowl, which means they spend a lot of time underwater, catching fish, frogs, insects, and crustaceans like crawdads, which they crush with their blunt bills. They also eat their own feathers. That sounds weird, but it’s actually something all grebes do. They even feed feathers to their babies. The feathers help keep pieces of bone or shell from traveling from the stomach to the intestines. Instead, the feathers and hard pieces of non-food form pellets which the bird horks up safely.

Baby grebes are the smallest of the small. They can’t swim right away like ducklings can, which you’d think would be a problem since grebes build floating nests on vegetation. But (you’ll love this) they ride around on their parents’ backs for a few weeks until they learn to swim on their own.

Oh, and the most interesting thing about the pied-billed grebe? It can sink. The first time I saw this happen, I really didn’t believe my eyes. I was birding along the edge of a slow-moving river, looked down at the water through the trees, and saw two tiny duck-like birds which promptly vanished into the water as though they’d been abducted by a submerged alien. One second they were there, the next they were literally just gone. The pied-billed grebe does this by trapping water in its feathers, which gives it incredible control over how far down it sinks and may also reduce drag while it swims underwater.

Now let’s talk about another bird, this one halfway around the world, definitely real, and completely flightless. The takahe was a chicken-sized bird with a greenish back, iridescent purple head and neck, and heavy red bill and legs. It lived in New Zealand’s swamps and grasslands. The white settlers introduced red deer, cats, ferrets, stoats, hunting for sport, and all the usual things. In 1898 four birds were caught…and that’s the last anyone saw of the takahe.

Of course there were rumors that the birds survived. There always are. But as with so many other animals driven to extinction by habitat loss, hunting, and introduced animals, hope for a surviving population of takahe gets smaller every year.

Wait a minute.

I’ve just been handed a piece of paper by my research assistant, who I just now invented. It says here that the takahe was discovered alive and well in the Murchison Mountains on November 20, 1948!

The takahe now lives in the Murchison Mountains and on five small islands, chosen as habitats because they’re free from predators. The birds mate for life and breed slowly, but they can live up to 25 years in captivity. They mostly eats seeds, insects, and the tender parts of grass stems, but one bird was caught eating a duckling. I like to imagine it wore a really guilty expression while chowing down.

Takahe chicks are fuzzy and gray with yellowish legs. The adults are about 20 inches tall, or 50 cm.

For a long time it wasn’t clear if the birds would even survive. In 1981 there were only 118 known individuals. The population now stands at over 400 with a careful breeding program in place to keep the species as genetically diverse as possible. When I first put together this episode in spring of 2017, there were only just over 300 takahes, so that’s a big improvement in only three years.

There’s not a lot more to say about the takahe. I’m just really happy that sometimes there are persistent rumors about an extinct species’ survival because it really has survived. Stay strong, takahe. Eat ducklings if you have to.

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Thanks for listening!