Wednesday, February 6, 2013

South Texas Thunderbird Sighting

The following was posted under the comments section of my post titled "Texas Pterosaurs" today:

"In 2007, my brother was talking to a man and his son that my brother occasionally worked with that lives in his trailer park in Edinburgh, Texas. The man and his son said they had been fishing in the canal behind the trailer park the weekend before. They said a giant bird landed in the canal a hundred yards from them and was wading around in the water apparently looking for food. The bird saw them and it wasn't afraid of them. It was wading towards them. The man said it was big enough to easily carry off the son, and they got scared and left. The man told my brother they will never fish there again."

Since this was posted as a comment anonymously I have no way of contacting this person to ask any follow up questions. Obvious things like color, estimated size, was the head of the bird feathered or bald, how long were the legs of the bird in relation to the rest of the body, etc. will remain a mystery. Since this is a second-hand report, these questions would likely have remained unanswered regardless.

As always, I cannot vouch for the veracity of reports that come to me in this manner. While I have no reason to believe this person is pulling my leg, I can't guarantee it. That being the case, take the report for what it is.

If there is anyone else out there that has seen an unusually large bird I would like to hear about it.

3 comments:

  1. I saw a large brown "bird?" gliding overhead tonight at Baylor campus right by Common Grounds. At first I thought it was a plane due to its immense size, but then believed it was just a gigantic bird (maybe 12'-18' wingspan?) that was flying much lower (maybe 50'-60'?).

    Frankly, I'm not sure what I saw because:
    1) It was a bit after 8 PM and dark.
    2) I didn't have my glasses on so my sight was blurry.
    3) I experienced cognitive dissonance because it seemed too large for something "normally known" to be flying so low.
    4) It was probably cruising at about 15 mph and by the time I decided to take a second look was nearly gone.

    So, could it have been an easily-explainable normal phenomenon like a large bird or low-flying aircraft? Sure.

    But, just to entertain the wild possibility that it was something else - I wonder if anyone else might have seen this?

    From my quick look, it appeared to be a mottled brown with some lighter, uneven highlights - leading me to believe it could have been feathered? It appeared to have more of a large, birdlike silhouette that was mostly fully-spread wings without much of a head. It may have flapped just a bit at the tips, but not much if so.

    However, it just seemed too low-flying and animal-like to be a plane...yet too large to be any known bird. Hence, I decided to submit this report just for the record. Alone, it is extremely inconclusive.

    But if anyone else saw or sees anything remotely similar around the same area - then that could add up to more of a possible case. :)

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  2. Back in 2007 I was walking to my car after work. It was already nighttime and I normally dont see birds out at that time. For some reason i looked up in the sky and i see this enormous bird and the reason why i knew it was big was because of these white birds flying next to it so I was able to identify this bird by its scale. I want to say that the wingspan of this bird was about 25 to 30 feet and that's just a quick estimate. It could of been bigger but again this was during the night where the visibility of light was poor. Anyways this happened in San Marcos, Texas in 2007.

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  3. I saw a bird with a wingspan easily reaching 40 ft.in San Marcos, Texas. This happened at nighttime in 2007. It was flying 2 to 300 ft over me and I noticed white small birds flying next to it and when I was able to compare the size comparison, that is when I knew I experienced the huge bird.

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