Alaskan members, what say you?

[url]www.adn.com/alaska/story/1979660p-2066841c.html[/url]
-By Peter Porco
Anchorage Daily News

(Published: October 18, 2002)
A giant winged creature, like something out of Jurassic Park, has reportedly been sighted several times in Southwest Alaska in recent weeks.

Villagers in Togiak and Manokotak say they have seen a huge bird that's much bigger than anything they have seen before.

A Dillingham pilot says he spotted the creature while flying passengers to Manokotak last week. He calculated that its wingspan matched the length of a wing on his Cessna 207. That's about 14 feet.

Other people have put the wingspan in a similar range.

Scientists aren't sure what to make of the reports. No one doubts that people in the region west of Dillingham have seen a very large raptorlike bird. But biologists and other people familiar with big Alaska birds say they're skeptical it's that big.

A recent sighting of the mystery bird occurred last Thursday morning when Moses Coupchiak, a 43-year-old heavy equipment operator from Togiak, 40 miles west of Manokotak, saw the bird flying toward him from about two miles away as he worked his tractor.

"At first I thought it was one of those old-time Otter planes," Coupchiak said. "Instead of continuing toward me, it banked to the left, and that's when I noticed it wasn't a plane."

The bird was "something huge," he said. "The wing looks a little wider than the Otter's, maybe as long as the Otter plane."

The bird flew behind a hill and disappeared. Coupchiak got on the radio and warned people in Togiak to tell their children to stay away.

Pilot John Bouker said he was highly skeptical of reports of "this great big eagle" that is two or three times the size of a bald eagle. "I didn't put any thought into it."

But early this week while flying into Manokotak, Bouker, owner of Bristol Bay Air Service, looked out his left window and 1,000 feet away, "there's this big . . . bird," he said.

"The people in the plane all saw him," Bouker said. "He's huge, he's huge, he's really, really big. You wouldn't want to have your children out."

To Nicolai Alakayak, a freight and passenger driver from Manokotak who was flying with Bouker, said the creature looked like an eagle and was as large as "a little Super Cub."

Comparison to an eagle, certainly. Super Cub? Probably not, scientists said.

"I'm certainly not aware of anything with a 14-foot wingspan that's been alive for the last 100,000 years," said federal raptor specialist Phil Schemf in Juneau.

Schemf, other biologists, a village police officer and teachers at the Manokotak School said the sightings could be of a Steller's sea eagle, a species native to northeast Asia and one of the world's largest eagles. It's about 50 percent bigger than a bald eagle.

The Steller's eagle has occasionally shown up in the Pribilof Islands, on the Aleutian chain and on Kodiak.

A bird known to be a Steller's sea eagle has been spotted three times since May and in August of last year, 40 miles up the Nushagak River from Dillingham, according to Rob MacDonald of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Another Steller's eagle took up residence on the Taku River south of Juneau for 10 summers starting in the late 1980s, Schemf said.

The fish-eating Steller's sea eagle can weigh 20 pounds and have a wingspan of up to 8 feet. It has a distinctive and impressive appearance, Schemf said, with a pronounced yellow beak, a black or dark brown body and large white shoulder patches.

"It's hard to mistake it for something else," he said. It's clearly an eagle, though more "like a giant bald eagle."

People who observe animals "don't always have the sizes right, but this is very different because the people in that area know what eagles look like," said Karen Laing, also a federal biologist.

"I don't know of any bird that's three times the size of an eagle," Laing said. "What would that be? An ostrich? What bird occurs here that would possibly be three times the size of an eagle or the size of a Super Cub?"
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[img]http://images.google.com/images?q=tbn:C7A6rdbR68kC:www.museum.upenn.edu/44eyes[/img]

A sign of the end times.

wow.
thats one big damn eagle!
Hope no one up there flys around in jets because you get that baby sucked in the engine and you are going down in a hurry.
How about some air defences? shit that thing could pick up a small child or dog and fly away! I know some AAA on every roof in alaska untill this bird is brought to justice. Or maby an air raid siren when there is a sighting. Finally Alaskins have a legit reason to mount a M2 on the back of there PU

They finally got a picture of it.

[url=http://www.fototime.com/68307C3A881707E/standard.jpg]Sighting near Denali on 10-19-2002[/url]

Umm, seriously, folks:  A creature very similar to the one in AK was reported to have been seen in Mexico back in the '60's.  A campesino shot at it to protect his kids.  They like to follow storm fronts and thus some people speculate that they are the genesis of the native american thunderbird legend.(I should probably delete that part--hell I should probably delete ALL of this...).  Hey, it was on Discovery so it has to be true, right?

Peter Porco was my literature professor at University of Alaska.  Just some trivia...

But the bird? I dont know.  Some people say it's just an unusually big Steller Sea Eagle that has wandered over to Alaska.  I looked at photos of those birds, and Sea Eagles (whose range is in NE Asia, not native to AK) dont look very big to me.  But I believe the eye witnesses about seeing a large bird.  Everyone's seen normal sized eagles and other birds, and the sperate sightings lend a lot of credibility.  So I believe the witnesses, but I dont have anything to say aside from that.

I concur.