Unfortunately, these are the young of the giant moa, and the parents are enraged.
The football-birds erupted in shrieks as he claimed the body of their fallen kin. Their traipsing picked up speed but not direction, like a stampede of bumper cars. They collided with each other, the brush, and even still his ankles in their aimless hysteria. Eventually, the birds at the periphery of the horde wandered further outward, and the crowd thinned.
He took this opportunity to amble forward on the vacated ground. He might as well search for kindling in all this growth, now that he had a meal in hand. Even without the swarm, he had to step cautiously about the uneven terrain, hopping from one leg to another over high obstacles. The snapping of twigs and fallen leaves punctuated his first several strides, but one anomalous footstep over a high fern coincided with a loud crunch.
He recoiled at first, waiting for his foot to signal some pain of pressure or impalement. When it didn’t, he navigated around the plant to investigate. A circular clearing, padded in dead grass and leaves, hid here; inside it, there rested the remains of several dozen eggshells that, when whole, had been the size of his head. Where his foot had landed, one of them had flattened into fingernail-sized fragments; the rest were mostly in halves or thirds, large chunks he inferred had split when their former owners had hatched.
He eyed the lifeless creature in his hand. Its size matched the eggshells well enough, and the number of eggshells he guessed was about right for the flock he’d seen before. But if this was a chick, it was the largest one he’d ever seen; only an enormous bird could have–
A deafening wail in the insufficiently distant distance. The foliage rustled and crunched in a succession of ever-closer steps. Two simultaneous screeches drowned out all other sounds. Large, angry somethings pushed through the high branches. A dim-witted bipedal primate stood dumfounded in their nest, one of their dead chicks in its shaking hand.
It was as if someone had inflated the symbol for quarter note to the size of a phone booth, tarred it, feathered it, glued a broad orange beak to the top of it, and mounted the whole thing on stilts. One of them raised its telephone-pole-thick leg with a flex of its backward-bending knee and plunged its enormous foot down on the ground a few feet from where he stood. The other flapped its useless wings and snaked its neck forward, opening its maw and repeating its cry.
