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The Haast’s Eagle (Hieraaetus moorei) is an extinct species of eagle that lived in the South Island of New Zealand. It is the largest eagle known to have existed, estimated to weigh anywhere from 10 to 18kgs with a wingspan of up to 3 metres. This formidable predator preyed mainly on the Moa, a now extinct species of flightless birds once abundant in New Zealand. Its extinction was due to over hunting of the Moa, their main food source by newly arrived Māori people, starving them into extinction.
History and Extinction[]
The ancestor of the Haast’s eagle is estimated to have arrived in New Zealand around 2.2 million years ago, around the same time it diverged from the ancestor of its closest living relative, the little eagle of Australia. The Haast's eagle then underwent a rapid increase in size unseen anywhere else. An example of island gigantism. It wasn’t until around 700 years ago, with the arrival of human beings, did their dominance come to an end. With the over hunting of its main food source and the burning of native forest, the Haast’s eagle simply could not survive, following the Moa into extinction, only one hundred years after human arrival. It was forgotten for the next few hundred years, until after the arrival of Europeans when the remains of a bird were discovered in a former swamp by the Canterbury Museum taxidermist, Frederick Richardson Fuller and was first scientifically described by Julius von Haast in 1871. Haast named the eagle Harpagornis moorei after George Henry Moore, the owner of the Glenmark Estate, where the bones of the bird were found.
Sightings[]
Modern science tells us the Haast’s eagle went extinct soon after the human settlement of New Zealand, by the year 1445. But during the colonial era rumours of a giant bird, that emitted the roar of a lion began to spread. Earl Jean, an ornithologist, supposedly came into possesion of an intact 3 metre wing of a bird shot down over Mount Aspiring in 1897. He decided it was that of the Haast’s Eagle and began planning an expedition to find a living specimen, but died before the project was completed. It is unknown what became of the wing.
The most well known encounter of the Haast’s eagle comes from the explorer Charlie Douglas who claimed in his monograph on the birds of South Westland (c. 1899) that he shot and ate two raptors of immense size on the Haast River valley or Landsborough River (possibly during the late 1870s or 1880s).
“The expanse of wing of this bird will scarcely be believed. I shot two on the Haast, one was 8 feet 4 inches (2.54 m) from tip to tip, the other was 6 feet 9 inches (2.06 m), but with all their expanse of wing they have very little lifting power, as a large hawk can only lift a duck for a few feet, so no one need get up any of those legends about birds carrying babies out of cradles, as the eagle is accused of doing.”
Gallery[]
