A month or two back I started a thread about news reports of a giant bird spotted in Alaska. The thing that made this story so credible was that the Alaskan witnesses were no newcomers to wildlife/big bird spotting.
So have there been any updates to the tale? Beadalin and stuyguy wanna know.
Yeah!
I haven’t heard anything. But, then again, I haven’t been looking.
Maybe I’ll call US F&WS on Monday.
The most recent info I’ve been able to find on the net is from Oct 15-18 - which is when the bird was first allegedly spotted. So it doesn’t appear that any one has seen anything since.
Haven’t heard anything either. FWIW, the originial article on CNN was very bizarre. It had pictures of famous giant birds, which consisted of one actual large bird, Larry Bird, and Big Bird! It made me think the article was some sort of hoax until I saw it elsewhere.
It was delicious!
I think the conclusion was that it was simply a very large Stellar’s Sea Eagle.
http://www.post-trib.com/cgi-bin/pto-story/columns/gordon/z1/10-20-02_z1_gord_1.html
Bumping this in case TheeGrumpy turns up anything else.
Trouble is with things like this is that it’s probably just misinterpretation of size of an ordinary bird; that being the case, it’s not likely to be repeated, but that in itself doesn’t and cannot disprove anything.
Thanks for reminding me, Beadalin. Er, maybe tomorrow. I wonder if there’s even a F&W officer on duty at the Togiak National Wildlife Refuge this time of year.
U.S. Fish & Wildlife told me today that there have been no further sightings since the two reported earlier. He seemed pretty sold on the Steller’s sea eagle idea, though he noted that such a bird would have changed its migration pattern in order to stick around that area.