Naturalist launches mission to prove moas are not dead as a dodo

It is thought to have been extinct for at least 500 years, but that has not stopped an amateur naturalist preparing to venture deep into the forests of New Zealand in search of the moa, a giant emu-like bird.

Moas are believed to have been hunted to extinction by Maori in the centuries after they settled New Zealand from Polynesia, about 1,000 years ago.

By the time Captain James Cook arrived in New Zealand in 1769, all that remained of the moa were bones, eggshell fragments and fossils, although reports emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries of a few stragglers surviving in the remotest corners of the country.

Undeterred by the scientific consensus that moas are well and truly extinct, Rex Gilroy and his wife, Heather, who run the Australasian Cryptozoological Research Centre near Sydney, are convinced a smaller cousin of the giant moa survives to this day.

The couple will travel to New Zealand next month to set up a base in the Ureweras, a rugged region in the northeast of the North Island, to stake out their quarry, known as the little scrub moa.

Mr Gilroy, 64, a cryptozoologist, devotes his energies to researching fabled creatures such as the Yowie, a sort of Australian Bigfoot, and the bunyip, a mythical lake creature that features in some Aboriginal legends.

In the past 30 years he has made eight research trips to New Zealand in pursuit of the elusive moa, during which he claims to have found tracks of the bird. He believes the prints, and the remains of a 'nest' in a hollowed-out tree trunk, reveal the existence of a colony of up to 15 moas.