A Cairns birdwatcher refuses to moderate her response to a six-foot extinct bird standing on the M1, and honestly, her position is difficult to argue with.

Her name is Diane Kowalczyk, she has been birding seriously for twenty-two years, she holds a field certification from the Australasian Ornithological Society, and she would like you to understand, with complete clarity, that she did not misidentify an emu. She was standing on the M1 highway outside of Cairns at approximately 6:40 in the morning on a clear day, with good light, and what she saw was not an emu. It was taller than an emu. It was wider than an emu. It had, in her exact words, ‘a posture that suggested it had been here before everything else and had simply decided to come back.’ I drove up from Asheville to think this through, which is perhaps disproportionate. I drove up from Asheville because I believe her.

The community response to Kowalczyk’s account — which she posted to a regional birdwatching forum within two hours of the sighting and which has since been shared approximately fourteen thousand times across platforms she neither controls nor particularly enjoys — has been, diplomatically speaking, divided. The less diplomatic word is hostile. Her local birding group issued a statement encouraging ‘measured and scientifically grounded reporting of unusual sightings,’ which is the kind of sentence that reads politely until you notice it contains the word ‘unusual’ doing a great deal of load-bearing work in the middle. Kowalczyk’s response to that statement is the title of this piece. I am quoting her directly. She was not speaking metaphorically.

Community Notice

What Nine Other People Also Saw

What elevates this account from singular to genuinely interesting — and I want to be careful here because ‘interesting’ is sometimes used in this field to paper over something more urgent — is that Kowalczyk was not alone. She was the only one who stopped. She was not the only one who saw it. In the week following her forum post, nine additional witnesses came forward independently, none of whom knew each other, none of whom had seen her original account before submitting their own descriptions, and all of whom placed a very large, dark-feathered, flightless bird in the same general corridor of the highway in the same forty-minute window. One of them is a retired wildlife biologist. One of them is sixteen and was in the back seat of her parents’ car. Both descriptions are, in their essential features, identical. I wrote down that detail twice in my notebook. I don’t always do that.

I have seen every large bird native to Queensland. I have seen cassowaries behave in ways that would make a grown man reconsider his route. This was not any of those birds. This was something that walked like it had nowhere to be and all the time in the world to get there.

— Diane Kowalczyk, Birdwatcher, Cairns

The Moa, for those coming to this fresh, was a genus of large flightless bird native to New Zealand — several species of it, in fact, the largest of which reached roughly three and a half metres in height, though the species most commonly described in relict sighting accounts sits closer to the six-foot range Kowalczyk is reporting. Moa are considered extinct. The conventional timeline places the last of them somewhere in the fifteenth century, which means Kowalczyk’s sighting, if accurate, carries implications that the Australasian Ornithological Society is going to need a longer statement to address. I say this without any pleasure. I say it because the witness count is ten, the descriptions are consistent, and the retired wildlife biologist — a woman named Patricia Fen who spent thirty years working in North Queensland — told me on the phone that she submitted her account not because she wanted to, but because she felt she had an obligation to the record. I respect that position. I have been there.

I submitted my account because if I had seen what I think I saw and said nothing, I would be doing exactly what I spent my career telling other people not to do. You observe. You record. You don’t decide in advance what the data is allowed to mean.

— Patricia Fen, Retired Wildlife Biologist

Diane Kowalczyk is not, by her own description, an excitable person. She catalogues birds with the kind of patience that makes you understand why the work takes decades. She showed me her field notebooks — physical ones, grid paper, ink only — and they are meticulous in a way that suggests someone who has made peace with uncertainty but has not made peace with imprecision. Those are different things, and not enough people distinguish between them. When I asked her what she wanted people to take from this, she was quiet for a moment, and then she said she wanted them to take it seriously. Not to panic. Not to dismiss. To simply take it seriously, the way you would take seriously any large animal standing in a lane of traffic that nobody currently has a satisfying explanation for. That seems correct to me. That seems, in fact, like the only reasonable place to start.

I am still in Cairns as of this filing. The Archive is going to need a new section. My thermos is empty and I have not slept especially well, which is not a complaint — it is data, of a kind. Somewhere south of here, ten people saw the same thing on the same morning, and the most credentialed among them chose to go on record because she believed the record mattered more than her professional comfort. I attended a funeral in 2019 for the same reason. I think Diane Kowalczyk and Patricia Fen would both understand that, without me having to explain it.