The Real Big Bird
Joint research by Oxford (UK) and Canterbury (NZ) Universities has uncovered startling new facts about NZ’s native Haast’s eagle. With a weight of 10kg, the Haast’s eagle was 30-40% heavier than the largest living bird of prey alive today, the Latin American harpy eagle, and is the only eagle ever to have been top predator in a major terrestrial ecosystem. Most interesting of all, the Haast’s eagle is descended from a tiny Australian eagle – not the large Australian wedge-tail, as previously thought – meaning it must have increased its weight 10 to 15 times in a period of less than a million years, an unprecedented speed in evolutionary terms.
