When Admiral Étienne de Flacourt published his Histoire de la Grande Isle de Madagascar in 1658 after a long stay in that country he gave a great deal of very exact information about the fauna which was so different from that of the African continent. But some of it was disbelieved as mere travellers' tales and was only proved to be true after several centuries. Among the woodland birds he mentioned:

Vouronpatra, a large bird which haunts the Ampatres and lays eggs like the ostrich's; so that the people of these places may not take it, it seeks the most lonely places¹.

Subsequent travellers told more detailed but also more fantastic tales about the bird's size, saying that its eggs were enormous, eight times as large as an ostrich's, big enough for the natives to use as tanks for drinking-water¹. Needless to say, hardly anyone believed these tales. The ostrich was already a monstrously large bird at 2.50 m high. A bird that laid eggs eight times as large would have to be impossibly huge. Orientalists suggested that these tales were just another version of the legend of the roc which Arab seamen believed could carry off a whole ship and her crew. Sinbad the Sailor ran across one in his second voyage after he found a roc's egg, which at first he mistook for a white dome of prodigious height and bulk: 'I drew near it and walked around it, but perceived no door to it...I made a mark where I stood, and went round the dome measuring the circumference, and, lo, it was full fifty paces.' This is a long way from the two-gallon shells reported in Madagascar.

Herodotus was told by Egyptian priests about a race of gigantic birds 'beyond the sources of the Nile' which were strong enough to carry off a man². As the most powerful eagle cannot lift more than a rabbit or a small lamb, this would be a staggering feat, though nothing to that of the Arabian roc.

In the thirteenth century Marco Polo claimed that Kublai Khan had shown him a bird's feathers 90 spans (about 20 m) long and two eggs of prodigious size². He said that he thought the roc came from some islands to the south of Madagascar. But the roc and the huge bird of Madagascar were assumed to be equally fabulous.

Nevertheless in 1832 the French naturalist Victor Sganzin actually saw an enormous half-eggshell in Madagascar. The natives were using it as a bowl. They would not sell it to him, so he drew a sketch of it, and in 1840 sent it to a renowned ornithologist from Paris, Jules Verreaux, then in Cape Town. In the meantime a traveller called Goudot found remains of similar eggs in Madagascar and showed them to Professor Paul Gervais, of the Paris Museum, who attributed them at first to a sort of ostrich.

In The Dodo and its Kindred Dr Hugh Strickland suggested that on de Flacourt's evidence there might be a large Brevipennate bird in Madagascar (at this time the Ratites or running birds were known as Brevipennates because of their short wing-feathers.) After the publication of his book in 1848 he received the following information from F. R. Surtees, who was then Her Majesty's Commissioner of Arbitration at the Cape of Good Hope.

In October 1848 John Joliffe, the surgeon of H.M.S. Geyser, made friends with a passenger called Dumarele who was a French merchant in his sixties from Réunion. He noted in his private journal that

After giving an account of some curious monkeys with white silvery hair M. Dumarele casually mentioned that some time previously, when in command of his own vessel trading along the coasts of Madagascar, he saw at Port Leven, on the north-west of the island, the shell of an enormous egg, the production of an unknown bird inhabiting the wilds of the country, which held the almost incredible quantity of thirteen wine quart bottles of fluid!!!, he having himself carefully measured the quantity. It was of the colour and appearance of an ostrich egg, and the substance of the shell was about the thickness of a Spanish dollar³, and very hard in texture. It was brought on board by the natives (the race of 'Sakavalas') to be filled with rum, having a tolerably large hole at one end, through which the contents of the egg had been extracted, and which served as the mouth of the vessel. M. Dumarele offered to purchase the egg from the natives, but they declined selling it, stating that it belonged to their chief, and that they could not dispose of it without his permission. The natives said the egg was found in the jungle, and observed that such eggs were very very rarely met with, and that the bird which produces them is still more rarely seen⁴.

Joliffe thought that Dumarele was certainly telling the truth, but believe that he 'was imposed upon in some way by the roguery of the natives.' All the same he added:

M. Dumarele's story should not be despised or discredited in these times, when such extraordinary discoveries are constantly made in every branch of science, but publicity should be given to this statement, that persons visiting Madagascar may, if possible, collect fresh information on the subject, and clear up the mystery. The sight of one sound egg would be worth a thousand theories.

Dr Strickland published these extracts from Joliffe's diary, making no comment except

It is a singular circumstance, if nothing more, that Marco Polo refers the Roc, of Arabian Nights celebrity, to the island of Madagascar; but as the Roc, however gigantic, was decidely not brevipennate [since its feathers were 90 spans long!] a discussion of its history would be irrelevant to our present subject.

Other naturalists concluded that both birds were equally fabulous, for nobody took much notice of these reports; they were not much publicised and seemed too fantastic to be true.

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Aepyornis's enormous egg held by the great wildlife photographer Christian Zuber.

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In 1851 the existence of a giant bird in Madagascar was at last officially admitted when a merchant captain called Abadie found three eggs and some fragmentary bones on the south-west coast of the island. They were presented to the Académie des Sciences at Paris by a certain M. Malavois. The two largest eggs were 34 cm by 22.5 cm and 32 cm by 23 cms, one being more elongated than the other. Their capacity was nearly two gallons. Each egg would have held six ostrich's eggs or 148 hen's eggs--enough to make an omelette for 70 people.

On the strength of these eggs and bones and with the precedent of Owen's Dinornis, described in 1839, Isidore Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire christened the Madagascar bird, naming it Aepyornis maximus, or 'the tallest of the high birds.' This name was not entirely deserved. The tallest of the birds was not the Aepyornis but the moa, or rather one of the moa tribe, which reached a height of 3.50 m. Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire deduced that the Aepyornis must be 5 m high partly because its egg was double the dimensions of an ostrich's. Actually the Aepyornis very rarely reaches 3 m: it is a bulky rather than a tall bird.

In 1866 the explorer Alfred Grandidier fished out of pools at Ambolisatra some huge bones in a perfect state of preservation. At first sight they seemed to belong to some large pachyderm, but when examined they proved to belong to the mysterious Aepyornis which was at once nick-named 'elephant-bird.' Soon enough other bones were disinterred for the huge bird's whole skeleton to be deduced. The complete skeleton of Aepyornis maximus reconstructed at the Paris Museum is 2.68 m high--a very respectable size for this bird³. There is no constant ratio between the size of a bird and the eggs it lays. The kiwi's eggs are as big as a medium-sized ostrich's, 12.5 cm by 7 cm, although the bird itself is hardly any larger than a hen. Its body is only three times as heavy as its egg.

All the same, even if Aepyornis maximus is not the tallest known bird, it is the largest and weightiest. Dean Amadon, an ornithologist of the American Museum of Natural History, has measured the principle Aepyornis and moa bones and compared them with those of the most similar living birds, the ostrich, rhea and emu, and has deduced that the Aepyornis maximus weighed 440 kg, while a 3 m moa weighed only 320 kg. The smaller, dumpier moas were no doubt proportionally heavier and more like the Aepyornis.

Gian Giuseppe Bianconi, a zoologist from Bologna, was so convinced that the Aepyornis and the roc were quite identical, that he published no less than 18 notes between 1862 and 1878 in his attempts to prove that the remains of birds found in Madagascar belonged to a giant bird of prey related to the Andean condor. But in due course a more thorough study of the Aepyornis's bones made it clear enough that, unlike the legendary roc, it could no more fly than the ostrich, cassowary, emu and other running birds. Like them, it had no [keeled] breast-bone⁵, and its wings were useless stumps⁶. All the same, there is little doubt that it was the bird that de Flacourt described by the name of Vouronpatra. Does this mean that it was still alive then? There is no doubt that the eggs found in the sand-dunes and mud around the great pools in the south and south-west were sometimes so fresh that they seemed to have been laid quite recently. The bones were equally fresh. And the natives said that the giant birds lived in the thickest forests of the island but were very rarely seen.

the Author's Footnotes

¹ Vouronpatra is spelt vorompatra in modern Malagasy and pronounced something like vooroompatch. Vorona is the Malagasy word for 'bird,' and patra means 'marsh'. Ampatres means 'marshy place.' The importance of the fact that the Malagasies thought of the bird as a marsh-dweller does not seem to have been realised.

² The 'feathers' may well have been palm-leaves.

³ Aepyornis maximus is the largest of the three known species. The smallest, A. hildebrandtii, is no bigger than an ostrich. A. medius is intermediate in size. The Aepyornis differs from the ostrich much more in weight than in height.

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Notes on this text

Bear in mind that Heuvelmans wrote this in French originally, and there are possibly some points which are obscured by translation to English.

1. If fact, tribesmen in the Kalahari have been known to use ostrich eggs as canteens as well, and Maori burial sites have yielded moa eggs used for water storage as well.



2. Presumably this account originates with the Phoenician circum-Africa expedition ordered by the Pharoah Necho in the 7th century BC.



3. I haven't measured a Spanish dollar recently; from the picture I've seen, the shell looks to be comparable to a dinner plate in thickness.



4. The Vorompatra was probably extinct for more than a century by this time.



5. Probable translation error: all birds have a breast-bone; ratites lack a specialized one with a keel, which is what the author means.



6. In fact, Vorompatra had no external wings at all: the "stumps" are internal.