The Live Moa Reports: a Waiau Shepherd (1873) and the Browning Pass 'Capture' (1874)

New Zealand’s giant flightless moa had been known to European science from bones since the 1840s. By the 1870s the hope that a few might still be alive in the back country turned up regularly in the newspapers. Two episodes from those years show how such a report was born and how it fell apart. One was a sighting that its own landowner played down. The other was a capture story that never produced a bird.

1873: “seen alive and in the flesh”

On 27 March 1873 the Otago Daily Times ran “Discovery of a Live Moa.” Its source was a gentleman it trusted entirely. He said the bird had now been “seen alive and in the flesh” on a run on the west side of the Waiau River in Southland. A shepherd’s dog had flushed a huge bird out of manuka scrub. According to the account, it stood on a terrace for “fully ten minutes,” bobbing its long neck the way a disturbed black swan does. Its plumage was described as silvery grey with greenish streaks.

The story was reprinted around the colony within days.

The runholder’s reply

The man who held the run then wrote to the Southland Times. Robert W. Aitkin of Clifden, Waiau, dated his letter 28 March, and it ran on 1 April. It took most of the story apart:

• The shepherd “did not use the word moa but said a large bird.”
• As for the man’s intelligence, Aitkin “certainly would not vouch” for it.
• There was “no confirmation” yet, “although a careful search has been made both for the bird and for tracks.”

He left one door open. If the moa did survive anywhere, he wrote, the west bank of the Waiau was “as likely a place as any.”

On 12 April the Evening Post printed Aitkin’s reply together with a Lyttelton Times item. In it a Dunedin enquirer predicted the affair would “turn out to be a canard,” because everything depended on the shepherd’s word.

1874: two moas on a tether rope

Eighteen months later, Christchurch’s Press printed a letter that one of its “valued correspondents” had passed on from a friend. The Star reprinted it on 2 October 1874. The letter was signed “R. K. M. Smythe” and dated Browning Pass, 26 September. In a breezy style, Smythe said his dogs had bailed up “two immense birds” at the head of a gully. He identified them as moas, or “as Dr Haast would put it, Dinornis gigantea.” He said he had roped the larger bird around a birch tree. With help from shepherds he had walked it down to camp, with the young one trailing behind. He gave the old bird’s height as “about eight feet” and said he would bring both to Christchurch.

The Press itself said it would not be surprised to hear the contrary. On 5 October it reported a second letter: the birds had escaped. The paper’s comment, carried by telegraph to the Wanganui Chronicle, was “that is just what we expected to hear.”

The verdict of the press

Other papers were much less kind than the Press had been to itself:

• The Grey River Argus (6 October) said its own telegram about the capture had been received “with a large amount of incredulity.”
• The Timaru Herald (7 October) called the letter a “pleasing fiction.” It said the Press had lent “its assistance to a hoax,” and suggested that Smythe was “as much an airy nothing as his moas,” with the valued correspondent being the Press itself. That last point was the Herald’s suspicion. No one has proved it.
• The Herald’s monthly summary for 21 October was blunter still: “we do not believe a word of it.”
• On 1 December the West Coast Times reprinted an Adelaide columnist. He said he had been fooled too often by bunyip stories to swallow two moas, and would take them with “the original pinch” of salt.

Legend and record

Claim	What the record shows
1873 sighting	One unnamed shepherd, a large bird, and no tracks. The person who knew him best wouldn’t vouch for him and said he never used the word “moa.” Unconfirmed.
1874 capture	One letter from a man no one could identify, and a convenient escape. No specimen, and open accusations of a hoax at the time. Debunked.
The science	A 2014 radiocarbon study (Holdaway and colleagues) puts the extinction of the moa in the South Island in the early-to-mid 15th century CE. It attributes the extinction to hunting and habitat loss by a small early Polynesian population. That is more than four centuries before either report.

The ledger hasn’t seen the Press originals of 2 and 5 October 1874. The text above comes from the Star, Grey River Argus and telegraph reprints. “Smythe” may well be a pseudonym, so this page doesn’t treat him as an identified person. The ledger has placed no map pins: the 1873 run was private farmland, and Browning Pass is named only as the letter’s dateline.

Ledger status

Hoax. The 1874 capture letter was treated as a hoax at the time, and nothing ever came of it. The 1873 sighting was a large bird that only the newspaper’s informant called a moa. Neither is compatible with the dated extinction record. It’s part of the Antipodes desk.

Sources

• “Discovery of a Live Moa,” Otago Daily Times, 27 Mar 1873 — Papers Past
• “The Moa” (letter, Robt. W. Aitkin, Clifden, Waiau, 28 Mar), Southland Times, 1 Apr 1873 — Papers Past
• “The Moa Story,” Evening Post, 12 Apr 1873 — Papers Past
• “Reported Capture of Two Live Moas” (from The Press), Star, 2 Oct 1874 — Papers Past
• “The Moas,” Grey River Argus, 6 Oct 1874 — Papers Past
• “Christchurch” (telegram, 5 Oct), Wanganui Chronicle, 6 Oct 1874 — Papers Past
• “Notes,” Timaru Herald, 7 Oct 1874 — Papers Past
• “Notes for the Month,” Timaru Herald, 21 Oct 1874 — Papers Past
• “The Canterbury Moas,” West Coast Times, 1 Dec 1874 — Papers Past
• R. N. Holdaway, M. E. Allentoft, C. Jacomb, C. L. Oskam, N. R. Beavan & M. Bunce, “An extremely low-density human population exterminated New Zealand moa,” Nature Communications 5:5436 (2014) — doi:10.1038/ncomms6436