A certain amount of romance surrounds the history of the discovery of Moa. During his residence in the Poverty Bay district between 1831 and 1837, Mr J.W. Harris collected a number of Maori articles and a bone belonging to a bird which, he says, the Maori called A Movie. This bone, a fragment of a femur of the species now known as Dinornis novaezealandiae, by 1839 had ended up in England and in the hands of Professor Richard Owen. After careful examination of the bone, Owen made his famous pronouncement; “there had existed and perhaps still exists in New Zealand a race of struthious birds of larger and more colossal size than the ostrich or any known species.” This deduction was made from a mere fragment of a femur some six inches, (150 cm.,) in length.
After this the rush was on to collect more bones.There are some great stories associated with discovering Moa bones; one of the best is about a schoolboy, Jim Eyles, who in 1939, at the Wairau Bar, discovered a Moa hunter burial complete with tools and ornaments and a complete Moa egg which had been drilled at one end to extract the contents.
Subsequent investigations showed that early Maori, some 600 years ago, utilised Moa for a variety of purposes. They fashioned fish hooks, harpoon heads, necklaces, pendants and other tools from the large leg bones, while the skins and feathers were used for clothing. Besides being eaten, the eggs were emptied and used as water containers. Evidence suggests that Maori herded Moa, probably with the help of dogs, along the eight kilometre-long gravel bar at Wairau to an encampment at the end where ovens were ready.
Europeans when they arrived crushed the bones for fertiliser, there were so many around in some areas.
The name Moa itself is a matter of some interest, study and contention. A review of all the myths and legends by Colenso yielded only one instance where the word was featured, concerning the fires of Tamatea. An old Maori chief, Urupeni Puhara, was recorded as saying: “The Moa was not the name by which the great bird that lived in this country was known to my ancestors. The name was Te Kura or the red bird; and it was only known as Moa after pakeha said so”. It was noted that Moa was the name for a domestic fowl in much of Polynesia, which if this was indeed the name given by Maori, is somewhat ironical.
There was also considerable debate on just how much knowledge Maori had of the great birds and whether or not they were the cause of the bird’s demise. It is now accepted that Maori hunted these birds to extinction.
Moa were very long birds not tall birds as the early depictions would have them. The Moa head was held only slightly above the level of the back. Its stance, according to Worthy and Holdaway, was very much like that of a cassowary. Dinornis females were huge, nearly two metres high at the back, but its head would not be held much higher. However, it could have reached twigs, leaves and fruit, three metres from the ground.
Moa had large legs and no wings at all, not even vestigial wings, a unique feature among birds, and hence no real breast muscles.
Based on feathers found, they were reddish brown birds with feathers perhaps tipped with white and black. Some feathers found have a yellowish central stripe.
The myth, starting with the early writer such as Haast, that Moa were grassland grazing birds, prevailed until the 1980s when research concluded that Moa were forest birds. Bill structure, gizzard stones and gizzard contents, all agree that the great birds preferred a very fibrous diet dominated by twigs snipped by their specially adapted beaks from low trees and shrubs. The smaller birds, Emeus and Euryapteryx, the Coastal Moa, the Eastern Moa and the Stout-legged Moa, had a less fibrous diet, probably dominated by fruit and leaves.
The lifespan of the Moa and most features of its biology is a matter for speculation. However, large birds generally live a long time, perhaps 50 years or so, given the lack of predators. Moa were a typical example of a K-adapted species which exhibit a variety of traits, including small numbers of young, long gestation and lack of defensive or escape capability.
Moa may have been hunted to extinction within a century of human arrival to New Zealand. Moa made such easy prey that by AD 1200 the hunting of Moa alone provided food surpluses sufficient to provide for the settling of large villages up to 3 hectares. These villages were permanent coastal encampments from which bands would set out on several week hunts to slaughter and carry back Moa. Over 300 Moa butchering sites are known, 117 on South Island which together account for some 100,000-500,000 Moa. With such abundance came a good deal of waste: as much as 50% of usable weight was discarded in the field. At around the same time as hunting was at it peak, the forests of South Island were burned off. The extraordinary abundance of food resources supported a population of as many as 10,000 people. However, by the late 1400s the Moa hunting society collapsed.
