Haast’s eagle was the largest eagle that has ever lived. It hunted in the forests and shrublands of New Zealand’s South Island, and its prey was the moa, a flightless bird that could weigh many times as much as the eagle itself. It died out around 600 years ago, not long after people first arrived on the islands. Nobody drew it on paper while it lived, but Māori rock drawings are thought to show it, and stories may remember it.
Built to kill a moa
Females were the larger sex, weighing around 10 to 18 kg depending on whose estimate you follow, with wings spanning about 2.6 m and perhaps as much as 3 m. For a bird that heavy the wings were short and broad, an adaptation for flying fast between trees rather than soaring over open land. Its feet were enormous. The museum Te Papa compares its claws to a tiger’s, and the talons reached about 7.5 cm, with one estimate of up to 11 cm for the hind claw.
A study published in 2021 scanned its skull, beak and talons and compared them with living birds of prey. The beak and talons were eagle-like: it probably seized the moa with its talons and delivered the killing blow with its beak. But the skull was built more like that of an Andean condor, which feeds by pushing its head deep into a carcass. The researchers concluded that Haast’s eagle killed like an eagle and then ate like a condor, starting with the soft organs.
A bald head?
That condor-like feeding suggests a head that was bare or only thinly feathered, as it is in vultures. Māori rock art seems to agree. A drawing at Craigmore Station in South Canterbury, thought to show the eagle, has a black body with the head and neck left uncoloured, and Māori cave art near Timaru, in the same region, is also described as showing a pale head. Accounts written down in the late 1800s describe black feathers tinged with yellow or green and a bunch of red feathers on the head, but those come from oral tradition, not from any specimen. Its true colours are not known.
From small to giant
Ancient DNA has shown that its closest living relatives are not the big wedge-tailed eagles of Australia but two much smaller species, the little eagle and the booted eagle. A study in 2019 put the split from the little eagle at about 2.2 million years ago. In the time since, the ancestor that reached New Zealand grew into a giant.
The end of the eagle
Polynesian settlers reached New Zealand in the second half of the 13th century. Within about two hundred years they had hunted all the moa to extinction, and the eagle, which depended on them, disappeared too. Burning of the dry forest and shrubland may have hastened its end. Most fossils come from the drier east of the South Island, from more than 50 sites, and none has ever been found on the North Island.
Māori tradition remembers a giant bird, the pouākai, that could kill a person. Haast’s eagle is commonly taken to be that bird, but this cannot be proved, and some have doubted it because the eagle is not known from the North Island.
The eagle may yet get a new common name. In 2025 the biologist Holdaway, who coined the name “Haast’s eagle” in the early 1990s, proposed calling it “Fuller’s eagle” after the man who actually found the first bones, in a former marsh on the Glenmark Estate.
