Film crew documents Tuscola chief's big bird story
By NATHANIEL WEST, Staff Writer


FINDLAY -- The large "Thunderbirds" return every 27 years to steal away the children of the Cherokee people, according to legend.

On Sunday, Chief John "A.J." Huffer returned to the lake where he claimed to have filmed two such Thunderbirds almost 27 years ago.

Were they really the monstrous predators of Cherokee lore, or were they just turkey buzzards basking in the warmth of summer?

Huffer believes in the former. But a film crew from Canada is trying to separate fact from fiction, and, perhaps, entertain young viewers of the non-fiction show "Mystery Hunters" in the process.

After all, entertainment follows closely behind Huffer, a Tuscola resident and chief of the Illinois Cherokee Band.

"It takes a Cherokee to film a Cherokee legend," said Huffer, 69.

In a deep yet gravely voice, he narrates the story like someone who has told it a thousand times. He probably has.

"I think I have photographed a living legend," he said.

Thus, he boarded a canoe Sunday with 16-year-old Araya Mengesha, one of two "reporters" on the documentary show aired by networks of Discovery Communications Inc.

With a cameraman, sound man, director and production assistant in tow, Huffer and Mengesha paddled across Lake Shelbyville while the chief recalled his tale.

A host of Internet Web sites describe how, in the summer of 1977 in Lawndale, a large bird swooped down and momentarily grabbed a young boy by the name of Marlon Lowe.

And rumors soon took wing that the Thunderbirds of old were back again. Of course, a sizeable reward was offered for pictures of them.

Huffer, who had learned to use a 16 mm camera with the U.S. Marine Corps, set out with his son, Jason, on the morning of July 26, 1977.

As they entered a cove near the Findlay marina on Lake Shelbyville, they spied two large birds in a tree. Huffer turned on his camera, the noise of which scared the birds into flight.

He shot about 100 feet of color film. Copies have since been purchased by television producers all over the world.

Huffer estimated the jet-black birds had wingspans of 18 feet and 14 feet, respectively.

Almost 30 years later, the story caught the attention of Montreal-based Apartment 11 Productions, which produces the children's show "Mystery Hunters."

"We're doing legends and myths," said Serge Marcio, director of the Thunderbird segment. "We're into ghost stories."

Mengesha and the rest of the Canadian crew also spent time Sunday in Normal with an Illinois State University professor and bird expert, Angelo Capparella.

After viewing Huffer's film, the professor told the young reporter that the birds probably were just turkey vultures, according to Cassie Fifer of Sullivan, the crew's production assistant, who was recruited for the Illinois shoot.

Marcio said "Mystery Hunters" will leave it up to the viewers to decide.

"There are pros and there are cons," he said. "That's what makes a mystery — there are no definite answers."

A host of Internet Web sites describe how, in the summer of 1977 in Lawndale, a large bird swooped down and momentarily grabbed a young boy by the name of Marlon Lowe.

Southwest Alaskans see bird they say is Super Cub-sized
Skeptical biologists say people are probably reporting a Steller's sea eagle

By Peter Porco
Anchorage Daily News

(Published: October 15, 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?"

Then it changed its flight path and I saw clearly it was a blue heron.

Folks, there are no living teratorns or other giant flying birds out there ... There just aren't. No extant pterosaurs either.

Thanks for being a voice of reason, AMereHuman. I was getting a little worried about this thread.

Folks, there are no living teratorns or other giant flying birds out there any larger than our magnificent condors, swans, albatrosses, pelicans, bustards, etc. There just aren't. No extant pterosaurs either.

So anything's possible.

I really don't know. I assumed only metal shows up on radar. Otherwise wouldn't every flock of birds flying South trigger radar?

Every flock of birds does trigger radar. Meterologists filter the bird signatures out before presenting the real precipitation signatures on the nightly news. Weather radar (unfiltered) is actually one of the most powerful tools we have to track birds on migration.

And recent remarkable discoveries were made about bird's migrations during nighttime, dark hours via weather radar.

And recent remarkable discoveries were made about bird's migrations during nighttime, dark hours via weather radar.

Every flock of birds does trigger radar. Meterologists filter the bird signatures out before presenting the real precipitation signatures on the nightly news. Weather radar (unfiltered) is actually one of the most powerful tools we have to track birds on migration.

A flying thunderbird would get jets scrambled often. There would be lots of reports.
Or... maybe they eat bats and have radar jamming capabilities.

Actually, you are kind of on the mark. The reason aircraft return such great radar signatures is that they are made out of metal and composites.

The story we're told with Doppler weather radar is that is picks up the water in birds' bodies. These signature show up very well despite the feathers.

Right, but a return on a weather radar is not going to scramble jets or get the military involved. Also, do they have "controllers" for weather radar? I would think that there is probably not somebody monitoring it at all times, but only during severe weather. Civil and military air controllers are on duty 24/7. Do bird returns on Doppler show up different from rain, or just as a smaller "patch" of percipitation?

Does the land in Washington create enough heat for large thermals or wind for dynamic soaring for such a large bird? I'm not familiar with the setting up there. I would think not often enough.

"Daisy in Spokane, Washington reported seeing what looked to her like a thunderbird. She said the low-flying creature had a shimmering, translucent copper color and was approximately the size of three cars. Daisy likened the experience to seeing a projection on a movie screen."

Any possibility that "Daisy" was higher than a kite when she saw her "shimmering, translucent copper" thunderbird? That's a far more likely explanation than that she actually saw what she says she saw.

On the topic of Thunder birds, a caller to Coast to Coast reported her sighting this way:

"Daisy in Spokane, Washington reported seeing what looked to her like a thunderbird. She said the low-flying creature had a shimmering, translucent copper color and was approximately the size of three cars. Daisy likened the experience to seeing a projection on a movie screen."