THE last person to claim to have seen NZ’s famed giant moa was a seven-year-old girl who lived on Fiordland’s west coast in the late 1800s. Alice McKenzie kept a diary of life in one of NZ’s most remote settlements and in her 1947 memoir she says in 1887 she saw a large blue bird unlike anything she’d seen before.
Alice examined its curved feathers and noted it had no tail. When she tried to tie it up the bird grunted, and when it stood up Alice claims it was taller than her. The bird left footprints 28cm long, far too big for any known living bird in NZ.
There’s been much doubt about Alice’s sighting but standing on the wind-swept bay, at the end of the Hollyford Track where Alice lived, if there was anywhere on earth where a bird thought to be extinct
