Canterbury

Canterbury - Flat Land

The land was flattened through hundreds of thousands of years of glacier movement spewing debris from the foothills via rivers across the plains below. This area was originally covered in tussock grassland and lowland forest and was home to two of the largest birds the world has ever known.

Moa

The moa is the largest bird ever known to exist on the planet. There were 2 main species and about 8 different sub species. The largest of these was the giant moa reaching nearly 3m tall and weighing around 250kg These great birds replaced the role of grazing animals in New Zealand's unique mammal free ecosystem, picking at foliage and berries around 2-3m above the ground. There were several key unique features of the moa, one is that it had absolutely no trace of any wing development whatsoever, the only bird of it's kind in the world, the other was the monstrous size of it's eggs around 240mm long and 178mm wide. Prior to the arrival of man the moa only had one a natural predator, the formidable Haasts eagle.If the Moa was a grazer, the Haast eagle was a lion. This monstrous forest dwelling predator had a wing span of around 3m and weighed up to 15kg. They would perch in the lowland forest branches and swoop down on unsuspecting prey hitting them at around 80 kmph, the force of the strike enough to bowl the giant moa over. The eagles would then savagely crush the skull or neck of the dazed animal, it's talons so strong they could pierce the pelvis of a 3m moa.

Haast Eagle

The Haast eagle or, Te Hokioi as it was known in maori, slowly disappeared as moa hunters encroached into their fragile habitat, burning and clearing land and feeding upon it's main source of food. It wasn't all one sided though, legend tells of men women and children being carried off end eaten. Being easy prey for Maori, the moa were slaughtered around the country to the point of extinction, over three hundred butchering sites have been found around the country accounting for an estimated 500,000 birds. With it's habitat destroyed and it's main source of food eradicated, the Haast eagle also passed in to extinction.

Did you know?

The worlds first powered flight arguably happened in the South Canterbury town of Waitohi on 31 March 1903 some eight months before the Wright brothers Kitty Hawk flight. Richard Pearse grew up on his fathers 800 acre station, he was referred to locally as Mad Richard, even his sisters stated they didn't think he was quite all there. Having a keen interest in engineering, he preferred to invent things rather than farm. His first invention was a unique type of bicycle with push pedals rather than rotating pedals, it also had self inflating tyres! Helped by an engineer from Timaru he learnt how to build spark plugs and carburetters. He developed a 2 cylander engine that fired at both ends doubling the power. The small engine weighed around 125lbs (60kg) and produced an astounding 25hp, unheard of at the time. He had been testing his engine since July 1901 and had also invented pneumatic tyres for the plane unlike the Wright brothers who had used skids. Pearse managed to fly the aircraft around 150 yards, a distance he considered too short to claim as powered flight.