In Search of the Moa

Narrated by John Bach (Duggan), this documentary investigates the moa — the "tallest bird that ever walked the earth". Nine species of the flightless bird with 'leg bones like those of a horse' flourished in ancient New Zealand but they couldn't survive humans. Animation and puppetry is used to depict the moa in its original environment. The documentary visits Fiordland to investigate a 1993 moa 'sighting' and palaeontologist Trevor Worthy extracts bones from an ancient swamp that claimed hundreds of victims. A farming contractor describes his awe at stumbling across a moa graveyard in a Hawke's Bay cave.

When I first started looking at the Canterbury Museum collections, there were many skeletons ... built by [Sir Julius von Haast] and others in the nineteenth century. By built, what I mean is they had gone into a swamp and pulled out thousands of bones ... joined them up and said this is a skeleton. There was very often bones of three species in that pile.

– Palaeontologist Trevor Worthy on early exhibits of mixed moa skeletons at Canterbury Museum, Stuff, 11 July 2020

Key Cast & Crew

Cameron Feast

Cinematographer

Carthew Neal

Production Coordinator

John Bach

Narrator

Cheryl Cameron

Director

Angela Littlejohn

Producer, Line Producer

Donna Malane

Writer, Producer