Wedge-tailed Eagle sighting

[David Riddell]

I am not meaning to go off-topic, but those "panthers" have occurred in Britain and Australia as well, and specimens have been killed in Australia. They are large in reality, but they are simply overgrown feral cats.

I've seen one of those overgrown cats myself, up in the Lewis Pass area. It was a pale grey tabby, so no doubt it was a feral cat, but I might've thought twice if it had been black. Given the above-mentioned difficulties of accurately estimating size, I'd say it was at least a metre nose to tail - by far the biggest cat I've ever seen.

[Mig]

Saw this on a Trade Me thread..it gave me a chuckle under the heading of Aggressive Tui went to our local duck pond yesterday with takeaway coffee in one hand and metre long stale breadstick in the other, expecting a peaceful few mins feeding sparrows and ducks. Hardly 3 steps from the car and nearly mown down by beating wings at head level - a huge duck came flying in to try to grab the loaf out of my hand! I held on and so did the duck and we had a brief tussle . He had a huge wingspan, dark green black and white feathers, and about knee high. What a fright, it made a Dozen onlookers scream and gave the kids a thrill, lol! Must be the season, usually those ducks are well behaved

[Mimouk Hannan]

Saw it twice this morning over Te henga swamp. Definitely no harrier

[Neil Fitzgerald]

I think this demands skiving off work for the afternoon!

[Neil Brown]

We were at home in Waiatarua on Saturday, and were surprised to see an unusually large bird-of-prey circling around the valley near our house. We then saw the story in the paper about a possible sighting of a wedge-tail eagle in the Waitakere's, and wondered if that was what we'd seen. Having read the postings here, and having done a bit of research, we think what we saw was a swamp harrier. It just didn't seem quite big enough for the eagle, and the tail was more like the shape of the harrier, as far as we could tell. Beautiful bird, I hadn't seen one before, and could easily have concluded it was an eagle.

[andrewcrossland]

Just reading through this thread. Its great to see that some folks have gone and had a look for this bird and treated the initial report (via a very credible person) in an appropriate way. Scoffs and instant dismissals from "arm-chair ornithologists", while taken with a grain of salt by regulars on birdingnz.net, can be perceived as anything from intimidating to insulting by newcomers who take the time to post to this site. While many random reports turn out to be misidentifications, I'm sure I'm not alone amongst serious birders to say that 100 misidentifications are well worth just 1 genuine record of a rarely recorded or endangered species. So how about, giving newcomers a bit of a break and not spend the best part of 5 pages either calling them idiots or double-guessing their reports?

cheers

[Neil Fitzgerald]

I spent 3.5 hrs looking from roads over Te Henga swamp and surrounding farmland yesterday afternoon. Also walked over the dunes toward Lake Wainamu to scan the hills. I saw a few nice big harriers, but as hard as I tried they all stubbornly remained harriers.
Didn't appear to be much in the way of carrion or potential prey on the farms.

On the swamp there was a mute swan, black swans, Canada and feral geese, and black shag. Also fernbirds calling.

[Michael Szabo]

Good on you for following this up Neil - with so many people having a mobile phone with photo capability these days, anyone seeing what they think is an eagle really need to take a photo!

[zarkov]

I checked it out today, saw nothing.

However, there's miles of similar habitat on that coast.

[Michael Szabo]

There's a story on the NZ Herald website today:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/animals/news/ ... d=11154488