Poukai

A shadow crossed the tussock faster than any cloud, and the people working the open ground learned to look up only when it was already too late. The pouākai hunted from a great height, dropping into a stoop that nothing on the plain could outrun, and it took a person the way a falcon takes a duck. What it caught it carried back to a nest high on the mountain, and there it fed without hurry.

The bird was built to that scale. Sir George Grey, who wrote down the traditions of the southern people in the nineteenth century, described it as a huge creature of black and white, crested in red, its wingtips washed a greenish yellow. Its beak was a hook made for tearing and its talons could close around a human chest. It lived among the crags of Te Waipounamu, the South Island, where the wind comes off the Southern Alps with a cold edge even in summer, and it ruled the air above the plains the way a shark rules a reef.

For the people below, the danger was constant and gave no warning. A woman bent over a garden, a child sent to fetch water, a hunting party crossing a river flat, any of them might hear the rush of air a half-second before the weight came down. There was no defence against a thing that struck from directly overhead at that speed. It ate people. Those it did not eat where they fell it bore up to the rock spur where it roosted, and the bones scattered below the nest told the rest of the story.

Where the bird came from, the older accounts do not entirely agree, and some traditions fold it in among the great tapu birds of the sky, the flock of Raka-maomao the wind god, who came down to the world only in darkness. The same enormous raptor is remembered elsewhere as te hōkioi, a bird heard high in the clouds and almost never seen. Whether hōkioi and pouākai were one creature under two names or two creatures that legend drew together, the shape of the thing is the same: something vast and winged, older than memory, that regarded human beings as prey.

The best-known story is set on Tawera, the peak later mapped as Mount Torlesse in inland Canterbury, where a pouākai had built its nest on a high spur and was steadily emptying the district of its people. A man named Ruru resolved to end it. He could not meet the bird in the open, so he set fifty of his people to labour over a deep pit, roofing it with a lattice of young saplings laid close together, and into the pit the fifty climbed with their long spears held upright. Ruru himself walked out into the open as bait. When the pouākai saw him and folded into its dive he ran, trusting his speed, and threw himself under the lattice at the last possible moment. The bird struck the roof of saplings, and fifty spears drove up through the gaps into its breast. It fought for a long time. Then the great man-eater died, and the mountain was safe again.

The strangest part of the story is that the bird was real. In 1871, in a swamp at Glenmark in North Canterbury, a museum worker digging for moa bones turned up a huge leg bone, a rib, and a set of claws that belonged to no bird then known to science. Julius von Haast, the first director of the Canterbury Museum, described the animal, and it carries his name still: Haast’s eagle, the largest eagle that has ever lived, with a wingspan reaching close to three metres and talons the size of a tiger’s claws. It hunted the moa, flightless birds many times its own weight, striking them at the pelvis and the skull. A creature that could bring down a two-hundred-kilogram moa could certainly kill a person, and the archaeology suggests it shared the land with people for generations. Eagles soar across the roofs of rock shelters in South Canterbury, painted by Māori hands, and the eagle’s own bones turn up worked into tools in old middens.

Its power was the power of the sky itself: surprise, speed, height, and a strength out of all proportion to anything else that flew. Against a lone person in the open it could not be resisted, only avoided. But its strengths were also the whole of its weakness. It was bound to its nest and its mountain, a fixed point that a patient enemy could study and prepare for, and its ferocity was exactly the lever Ruru used, since a bird that always attacked could always be led to attack the wrong thing. The living eagle carried a deeper vulnerability still. It was a hunter of giants, and when the moa were hunted out and the great forests burned back, nothing was left large enough to feed it. Haast’s eagle vanished around six hundred years ago, passing out of the world and into legend, which is the one place it still hunts.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Poukai?

The Poukai, or Pouākai, is a giant man-eating bird of prey from Māori mythology, best known in the traditions of New Zealand’s South Island. It hunted people from a great height and carried its victims to a mountain nest, and it appears in legends about the heroes who finally destroyed it.

Did the Poukai really exist?

The Poukai legend is widely thought to preserve a folk memory of Haast’s eagle, the largest eagle that ever lived, which was native to the South Island and became extinct around six hundred years ago. Its bones were first identified in a swamp near Glenmark, Canterbury, in 1871, and Māori rock art in South Canterbury depicts huge eagle-like birds.

How big was the Poukai?

In tradition the Poukai was large enough to seize and carry off an adult human. The real Haast’s eagle it is linked to had a wingspan approaching three metres and talons comparable to a tiger’s claws, powerful enough to kill moa weighing far more than a person.

How was the Poukai killed?

In the best-known legend, set on Tawera (Mount Torlesse) in Canterbury, a hero named Ruru trapped the bird. He hid fifty spearmen in a deep pit roofed with a lattice of saplings, lured the Poukai into its dive, and let it strike the lattice while the fifty drove their spears up into its breast.

What did the Poukai look like?

According to tradition recorded by Sir George Grey, the Poukai was an enormous black-and-white bird with a red crest and yellow-green tinged wingtips. It had a heavy hooked beak and huge talons suited to seizing large prey.

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