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But there had been nothing to approach the enormity of the creature now standing before the new settlers. This thing walked on massive clawed feet affixed to two bony legs the thickness of rowing paddles. Its rotund body was covered in a shaggy cloak of plumes, narrowing to a long serpentine neck and a blunt and sturdy beak. From head to toe, the beast towered as tall as any two of the clansmen. It is not recorded which of the strangers fled upon the first encounter, but very soon thereafter—as the fossil record would abundantly reveal—one definitely became the pursuer.
    The giant moa, as the first people of Aotearoa came to learn, made for epic feasting. A guild of moa hunters rose to the task, learning to avoid those treacherous feet and to spear and tackle and subdue these walking bonanzas of bird meat.
    The moas were of a family of some fourteen long-distant cousins to the ostrich, some dwarfing their African counterpart, some as small as a bantam hen. All were flightless, and all were rabidly assailed. The moas’ eggs, laid on nests of naked ground, became giant omelets, their shells drinking cups. Bones piled high in the middens of the moa hunters. One butchering site, excavated five hundred years after the hunting had ended, contained the remains of 678 moa. The bone gardens were so thick in places that industrial-age entrepreneurs came to mine and market the refuse as fertilizer. Within perhaps a century of the moas’ meeting with the first people of Aotearoa, no moas remained.
    The moas of Aotearoa were to become the symbolic victims in a country of evolutionary oddities on the verge of plunder. The landmass had been born in the breakup of the supercontinent Gondwanaland some 130 million years before the human form had been conceived, coming unstitched from Antarctica and Australia and drifting away on its own course. In its early departure Aotearoa had left behind those creatures that would one day be mammals and had set sail as a country stocked with primitive insects and spiders, dinosaurs, reptiles, and birds.
    And from the threadbare cast of animal designs, the eons of isolation and evolution built a bizarre menagerie. With the demise of the dinosaurs, their descendants took over. While the rest of the world underwent a mammalian revolution—a flowering of furred creatures from mice to mammoths—the mammalian niches of Aotearoa blossomed with birds.
    Aotearoa was the evolutionary crucible that produced the modern kiwi, a wingless bird wearing its nostrils on the far end of a dipstick bill, for probing little creatures deep in the forest duff. About the size of a domestic chicken, the kiwi lays an egg six times the size of a chicken’s egg—a quarter of the mass of its mother. Unlike flying birds, whose bones are hollow for lightness, the hefty kiwi has bones filled with marrow, like those of a mammal.
    With the development of the moas, the biggest of them standing nearly twelve feet tall and weighing a quarter ton, Aotearoa had itself the ecological counterparts of the horse and the camel. No tigers or wolves existed to hunt them, but there were equivalents patrolling the skies, most spectacularly in the form of an enormous eagle, Harpagornismoorei , with a ten-foot wingspan and meat-hook talons that probably gave young moas their best reason for running.
    Vying for the title of the oddest of the lot was the kakapo, Aotearoa’s answer to the possum. The kakapo was, at its ancestral core, a parrot, beyond which comparisons became vague. It grew big and chunky, up to nine pounds heavy and two feet high, more closely resembling an owl. It was the heftiest parrot ever, a feat made possible in its abandonment of flight. The kakapo scuttled about in the understory of the brushlands, hobbitlike, foraging for fruits and nuts and leafy greens. It sometimes climbed and clambered about the trees. Its only ingrained fears came from the skies in the form of raptors, which it escaped by