A South Canterbury woman who walks the same stretch of coast most days has ended up with about half a bucket of moa bones, after spotting something in a clay bank that did not look like driftwood.
Pippa Yates found the first bones at St Andrews Beach, south of Timaru, and the South Canterbury Museum confirmed they came from the extinct flightless bird. She has kept finding more since, including another batch the day before she spoke to RNZ’s Checkpoint on 18 September.
What gave the first find away was the texture. “The porosity of the bone, I could tell looking down on it that it looks sort of like a cross section of a bone as opposed to a piece of driftwood or something else stuck in the mud,” Yates told Checkpoint.
In a report published by the New Zealand Herald, she said she was certain straight away. “I knew as soon as I saw them that they were bones. The wear on them led me to believe they were very old,” she said. Her first move when she got home was to ring the museum, which had experts look at the material and confirm they believed it was moa.
Cleaning them has turned into a slow family job, done with nothing but cold water. “We put a bit of cold water over the bones, which are sort of still within clay in big chunks, and swish the water over them from side to side, let them sit for an hour or more, and then drain the water out and start again, being careful not to lose any of the tiny bits of bone as well, so it’s a slow process,” Yates said.
The results have beaten expectations. “Anytime we get a spare moment, we clean the bones that we’ve got. We’ve got probably a good half a bucket full of moa bones now, so they’re seemingly coming up a lot better than we expected they would,” she said. “The museum said they’d crumble apart, so far we’ve got some really big pieces that have actually made it through being cleaned very carefully.”
The find was not luck alone. Yates said the family had been looking at that beach for about four years, after hearing that someone else had turned up a moa footprint and bones in the district. She walks with her eyes down the whole way.
“I walk looking at my feet basically the entire time where we walk, specifically in all the clay banks, we always look in those areas thinking we might see a footprint, and that’s something I can bring my daughter back to see,” she said.
Her daughter is already a regular at the museum in Timaru. “She’s obsessed with the museum, and she knows where everything is and likes to show anybody that comes to visit us where everything is in the museum,” Yates said. The family plans to keep some of the larger pieces at home and hand the clearest specimens back. “But any of the really obviously bone-looking bones, we’re going to try and give back the museum, which will be nice to have on display,” she said. Smaller fragments are destined for specimen jars to take to her daughter’s kindergarten and school.
The Otago Daily Times photographed museum director Philip Howe and educator Keely Kroening measuring the bones. No species has been named yet, and none of the reports puts an age on the material beyond old.
Palaeontologist Hamish Campbell told the Herald the find was fascinating, and that more will turn up. “A lot of people don’t know what they’re walking over. In general people are finding them less and less, but I do think we will keep finding them,” he said.
Moa were New Zealand’s largest land animals and there were nine species of them, according to New Zealand Birds Online. Seven of the nine lived in the South Island. The largest, the South Island giant moa, showed the widest size gap between the sexes of any bird, with females weighing between 76kg and 249kg against 34kg to 85kg for males, and females able to stretch to about 3.6 metres when feeding on high foliage. They ranged across coastal dunes, shrubland, forest and subalpine grassland, and every species was gone within a few centuries of people arriving, hunted out by early Māori.
South Canterbury has a strong record of giving up moa material, usually when the weather does the digging. In 2022 a storm-eroded beach at Pareora, a little further up the coast, exposed footprints and bones that Pareora resident Chris Sargent came across while out with his dog. They were Canterbury’s first set of moa footprints and only the second found in the South Island. Canterbury Museum senior curator of natural history Paul Scofield identified the prints as belonging to a heavy-footed moa or a giant moa from the Holocene, the geological period covering roughly the past 12,000 years. The prints were photographed, cast in plaster and excavated, and replicas were later 3D printed for the playground at Caroline Bay in Timaru.
Older prints again have been recorded elsewhere in the south. Researchers led by Kane Fleury of Tūhura Otago Museum described a trackway of seven footprints from the bank of the Kyeburn River in a paper published in the Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand in November 2023, and dated the layer that buried them to 3.6 million years old. That is a different order of antiquity from bones sitting in coastal clay, and it shows how wide the window is when moa remains surface.
The catch with beach finds is that the sea which uncovers them also destroys them. Bones held in a clay bank can be washed clear one week and smashed or buried again the next, which is why Yates said she was worried enough to pick up the phone rather than leave them where they lay. It is the same mechanism that produced the Pareora prints, where heavy rain burst an adjacent pond and stripped away the shingle that had been hiding a hard mud layer.
For now the bones are sitting in water in a South Canterbury kitchen, being turned over an hour at a time, and a four-year-old is waiting for a footprint.
Have you ever found something unexpected on a New Zealand beach, or do you know this stretch of coast south of Timaru? Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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