Rare moa find

Chris Sargent and the moa bones he found on the beach at Pareora. There were also footprints that have been hailed as the first confirmed moa prints found in Canterbury.

A daily walk with his dog took on a momentous discovery for Chris Sargent when he found Canterbury’s first set of confirmed moa footprints, according to a senior curator.

The truck driver was walking Bo along a beach near his Pareora home when he discovered the footprints, and then the bones of the now extinct flightless bird about 30 centimetres away.

‘‘It [the footprints] looked familiar to me as I had noticed it in an earlier report of moa footprints from Central Otago,’’ Sargent said.

He was referring to the first set of Moa footprints discovered in the South Island in 2019.

‘‘I looked around and found four to five footprints and I thought to myself ‘this is too much of a coincidence’.’’

He took photographs of the footprints and bones and immediately contacted South Canterbury Museum director Philip Howe.

‘‘I went back down the same day and carefully extracted the bones, or they would’ve been damaged or lost because of the environment they were in.’’

Sargent said he felt ‘‘pretty privileged and lucky’’ to have made the discovery and was glad he found them before they were gone for good.

‘‘It’s pretty exciting. I don’t realise the true significance myself but I’m beginning to realise what the discovery really means.’’

Howe said he was ‘‘extremely excited’’ when he got the call.

‘‘We were communicating with each other and I contacted Paul Scofield [senior curator of the natural history at Canterbury Museum] who confirmed it was moa footprints.

‘‘I went down there the next morning [August 6] and I was gobsmacked to see those amazing footprints preserved in a highly volatile and easily-damaged environment.’’

Scofield advised Howe and Sargent to cover the area in plastic until he could get to Pareora.

On August 12, the trio visited the site and carefully took photographs of the clearest footprint so a 3-D model could be made, made plaster casts and excavated the footprints.

The footprints are now surrounded by wooden plate and have been left to dry at the South Canterbury Museum.

Sargent said he had also donated the bones to the museum.

Now the challenge would be to keep the clay (on which the footprints were found) from deteriorating, so it could be used for scientific research and in exhibitions in the future, Howe said.

‘‘When he [Sargent] spotted the footprints and bones he took photographs first which was key to preserving them,’’ Howe said.

‘‘Another key thing is that this discovery tells us a lot about how our land has changed over thousands of years.’’

On the day they excavated the footprints, Howe said they noticed deterioration had occurred with high spring tides washing away some mud where the prints lay.

‘‘In addition, seagulls had made indentations, and a 4WD vehicle had driven about 300 millimetres away from one of the prints.’’

He said the site had been exposed when heavy rain caused a pond behind the beach to burst, scouring out the shingle that covered the hard mud layer with the prints.

Howe said the museum is ‘‘over the moon’’ the bones and the footprints are there and said the best part of his job was never knowing what was going to show up.

Scofield confirmed the footprints were Canterbury’s first and the second for the South Island, and believes they belong to a heavy-footed moa or a giant moa from the Holocene period, meaning it was less than 12,000 years old.

‘‘I believe the moa was an adult and there is also a possibility that there were two birds at the site because we found two individual sets of footprints.’’

Scofield believes the bones found by Sargent showed the birds might have possibly got stuck in the mud and died there.