New Big Bird Sightings
Posted by: Loren Coleman on June 9th, 2006
How often are large unknown birds seen and quickly explained away? Quite frequently, if a quick survey of newspapers are any indication this week.
In Gary Bogue’s June 9, 2006, column on animals in the Contra Costa Times of the East Bay area near San Francisco, California, he publishes an item on a new big bird sighting. I corresponded with Bogue over 30 years ago, as I mention in Mysterious America, regarding the melanistic felid (Black Panther) accounts coming his way. It is obvious Bogue has become and been serving as the local man-to-go-to with any reports of strange animals.
Here’s Bogue’s exchange:
Dear Gary:
Is it possible that we saw a condor during our morning walk last week?
We were walking by the San Ramon Creek and looked up at a large bird in an oak tree (about 30-40 feet) perched like an eagle on a covered limb. The bird had a large red head. It was much larger than a turkey vulture. Maybe someone else saw it?
Don, cyberspace
Dear Don:
Anything’s possible, but I would REALLY be surprised if it was a condor.
I’ve had no reports of any other sightings of “condors” in the area.
California condors spend a lot of their free time riding the thermals down along the Big Sur coastline. They also release a lot of captive-bred condors in the Grand Canyon, if you happen to be poking around Arizona. It’s always a major thrill to look up and suddenly see one of those monsters come gliding out of nowhere.
I suspect what you saw was a large turkey vulture. Vultures can look pretty big when you’re standing on the ground and staring up at one perched in a tree above you. (Condors also have large wing-bands for identification purposes with big numbers that can be seen from a distance while the bird is flying or perching.)
In the 36 years I’ve been writing this column, none of the occasional “condor” sightings in the Bay Area have turned out to be the real thing.
Of course, there’s always a first time for everything …
Large bird sightings in California are not uncommon, but with the California condor in the state, they are the first bird that are often thought to explain them, well, that is, after turkey vultures.
Next, comes a report of a sighting of a large unknown bird near Kirkintilloch, Scotland. The ancient city of Kirkintilloch, located northeast of Glasgow, but unlike most cities there where you will find a link to “kirk” meaning “church,” it is named after a local fort. Kirkintilloch comes from Caerpentaloch, Fort at the Head of the Hill. The forts were those along the Roman Antonine Wall, and the remains of the one after which this town was called can still be seen in Peel Park here.
On June 7, in the Kirkintilloch Herald, there ran a report (thanks to Patrick Huyghe for passing it along) on large avian sightings. Bishopbriggs resident Walter Morrison was investigating accounts that a huge bird was eating all the local fish in the area ponds, including his last month in Atholl Gardens:
Witnesses told Walter that a ‘giant bird’ had swooped down and tucked into the fish – including Koi carp, which cost around £50 each. He told the Herald: “My daughter happened to be looking out of the kitchen window at the time and saw this giant bird beside the pond. She said its wingspan must have been about eight feet. My neighbour also saw it and said it was huge and looked like a pterodactyl! I’d bought a plastic heron for beside the pond as apparently they don’t go into each other’s territory, but that obviously hasn’t worked. I’d say all the fish cost around £300 in total so, after spending that amount of money, it is heartbreaking and I just want to let other people know they should be on the look-out.”
Morrison speculated it was a heron.
In Hall’s 2004 book, Thunderbirds: America’s Living Legends of Giant Birds, he discusses, in some detail, the often mundane explanations given for large cryptid bird sightings. Obviously, sometimes people are seeing turkey vultures and herons. Other times they may not be.
About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.
It may have been a buzzard.They are seen in the Glasgow area now it is illegal to trap them. However it hasn’t stopped someone killing 5 red kite from a new breeding colony set up recently. There are also experiements of black kite mating with the red kite but so far no chicks.
There are a lot more large birds of prey in Scotland then there were 10 years ago.
Or could also be an overseas visitor. The hot weather we are having at the moment is attracting a lot of usual birds and insects. I don’t know what the weather is like for other people but it’s 30oC in my office and about 25oC outside at 2pm UK time, and I don’t live in the south.
Dear Loren,
I sometimes think “Thunderbirds” or “Big Birds” may be responsible for stories of eagles abducting children–which mainstream ornithologists argue eagles are incapable of doing. The July 25, 1977 Lawndale IL incident is one well-documented modern case of a “Big Bird” doing exactly that, actually carrying a small boy, 10-year-old Marlon Lowe,for a short distance before dropping him. Eagle child abduction stories were especially popular in both American and European newspapers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Some of these may perhaps have reflected actual “Big Bird” attacks similar to the Lawndale incident. Along with Ambrose Bierce’s 1893 short story “Charles Ashmore’s Trail,” such news stories probably helped inspire the “Oliver Lerch” myth of an Indiana farm boy abducted by a weird flying “something” while fetching a pail of water from the well on Christmas Eve, 1889 or 1890. “Big Birds,” I’ve long felt, may also underlie the ancient Greek myth of the “Harpies,” monstrous birds blamed for mysterious disappearances of human beings.
Cheers,
T. Peter
The issue of the thunderbirds is certainly an ‘abominable mystery’.
On the one hand, they are seen or reported rarely. On the other, some of the reports seem unequivocal on the size & appearance of the birds, setting them apart dramatically from the largest known species.
I confess I cannot simply dismiss the sightings as misidentifications in all cases. Yet the evidence that a bird as large as the ‘thunderbirds’ exist today in a real physical sense is lacking. I am even driven to consider “time slips” or ghosts to explain some of these sightings, so dramatic they seem in certain cases.
Tangentially related is the question of why prehistoric animals attained such large sizes, whereas today mammalian species’ metabolisms do not seem to allow for such giantism.
Something instinctively tells me this data is the key to a great mystery, but it is just beyond us.
re #3 ‘Yet the evidence that a bird as large as the ‘thunderbirds’ exist today in a real physical sense is lacking. I am even driven to consider “time slips” or ghosts to explain some of these sightings, so dramatic they seem in certain cases.’
While I consider myself relatively open minded, I gotta ask…
Why are “time slips” easier for you to consider than a small, flesh and blood population of big birds?
I’ve always heard that we (the US/World) knows more about outerspace than we do about our own oceans. There is so much to be discovered. I would like to take the stance that what if, just what if there are some really big birds out there. I think there could be. Few and far between, but I think there could be the chance.
I agree there just could be some big birds still around. I would think that not all of the sightings can be explained as something known. The comment about not knowing much about our oceans. I have read in a couple places we have only searched about 3-4% of our oceans. Now if that is true just think what is out there swimming around that we have no clue about!!!!
It is interesting to look at the “Kirkintilloch Herald” and its report. The two witnesses described the creature in question as a “giant bird” whose wingspan “must have been about eight feet” and which “looked like a pterodactyl”. That description doesn’t really fit that of a heron; but the newspaper seems quite clear that it was a heron. But perhaps this is a new species of heron with eight-foot leathery wings and a distinct lack of feathers?
I’m reminded of Fort’s remarks upon evidence and witnesses: the explanation is “all very well except for what it disregards”. “That, by due care in selection, and disregard for everything else [anything] could be identified with anything [else]” (Book of the Damned, ch3).
I don’t know there…I live on the coast of southern New Jersey, where herons and egrets are quite plentiful, where I routinely work as a field guide in the salt marsh. Even I do doubletakes sometimes, because the herons look so big and odd. To the inexperienced, or at first glance, their legs tucked behind them can look rather a lot like a long, thin tail. Couple that with a pointy beak and a coiled neck to give the appearance of some sort of head frill and voila!- instant pterodactyl (Well, pteranodon, actually, but most people know the other name).
This is not to say that there are no Thunderbirds, of course, just that misidentification is easier than some may think. Personally, I think many Jersey Devil sightings are of Thunderbirds- Red eyes, dark wings and a horse-like head are commonly-reported features of both.
Chymo,
the current lack of giantism has more to do with the time period we live in than any lack of tendency towards it in modern mammals. Just look at the mammoth and baluchitherium for examples of mammalian gigantism…or giant beavers for that matter. The environmental changes brought about by the end of the last ice age, almost certainly coupled with the spread of early human hunters, led to the extinction (Or reduction, shall we say, in cases where there is some CZ evidence for late survival) of many of the larger mammals. The simple truth is that a significant change in environment can dramatically alter or reduce the availability and variety of food sources. Bigger animals require more food, thus, they suffer where smaller ones do not. In the sea, today you find that huge leatherback sea turtles are critically endangered, while the much smaller loggerheads are only threatened. In Australia, fossil studies have shown that emus were able to subsist on scrub grasses and weeds, whereas the much larger genyornis needed the greater bounty of the savannah and peripheral forest shrubbery to survive. When the savannahs were burnt by humans, both birds switched their diets, but only one survived.
I direct your attention to the sky. Just think about how much time you actually spend looking upward when you are going anywhere…in the car, by bike, on foot. Do you really keep your eyes skyward…me neither most of the time…I would like to think I would see something like that flying overhead, but if it was high enough, I believe it very possible I would ASSume it was a plane…and the higher up, the smaller things look anyway.
Most skeptics would ASSume that if there were big birds somebody would see the darn things and those people would also have cameras and video and what not, but you know what assuming does…
I am not convinced at present that we have a population of pteranodans, dactyls or 30 foot wingspan birds roaming, but to assume they are not there on the basis of conjecture is much more ridiculous than a population of pteros flying around…as for me, I am keeping my eyes to the sky…
I don’t think the Kirkintilloch bird would have been a buzzard Tabitca – they’re usually savengers and definately don’t hunt over water. Could have been an Osprey though. There is a breeding population in the Lake District (c.100 miles south) that have had young that could have moved on to establish their own territories. I saw one heading to the Lakes this year, it looked huge – they could easily be mistaken for something with an 8 foot wingspan. Saying that, so could a heron…and that big ptero like beak…
I have never heard any thunderbird stories about fishing. they usually went for bigger prey that would sustain them, right? how close is that town in scotland to the ocean, maybe it was some sort of eagle or something coming in from the coast. I dunno, I would like to think that not all animals of a larger size were wiped out for any reason. I find it interesting that someone above mentioned mamoths because not too long ago (couple years max) there was an expedition trying to find mamoths in India. The idea there was that in building the taj mahol large, hairy elephants were used to move some of the bigger columns. So whose to say that all the larger animals are extict.
Maybe people are already aware of this photo of a giant bird sighting. And maybe it’s a hoax. It looks pretty real to me though. I was stunned when I first saw it. Wish I knew who took it.
It is from a Hong Kong website where people who fly RC airplanes post pictures. Check out the website I took it from:
http://www.rcsail.com/soaring148.jpg