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Comment by EdwardDiego | Hacker News Reader

In fairness, it's nocturnal and probably buggers off quickly when it spots you.

But I'm biased, I'm a moose believer (or as I like to call it, a moother) based on the circumstantial evidence, but a lot of people are skeptical a creature as large as a moose could keep a low profile that long.

https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/103196185/new-zealands-moos...

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Hah, that moose one is new to me. We have a history of some big cat sightings here around Sydney and NSW. The usual story is some US military people brought it (them?) for some reason and it escaped, I think. Though there are many stories and explanations as you'd expect.

Personal story, the first I ever heard of big cats living in the Grampians, Victoria was after coming back from a lone morning hike up Boronia Peak overlooking Halls Gap. I would have been around 14 at the time and told some of the adults back at the campsite that I found really big cat paw prints on the bank of a creek.

Similar story of US Airmen releasing their mascot pumas into the wild.

Rural WA'ian here. There's plenty of rumours of a "panther" around Nannup; no US Airmen story, it was just a really big black feral cat the size of a panther.

From what I've seen personally, feral gets can get BIG. Like mastiff-sized. So I tend to believe these rumours but take their origins with various grains of salt.

The origin stories should be taken with a grain of salt, but that we have cougar-sized ferals is well recorded. There was a Gippsland feral killed and DNA tested that was half as big again as a record-sized domestic cat.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2005-11-28/tests-reveal-super-si...

Well, we definitely know that they were there, released in the hey-day of Acclimatisation Societies, but the last proof of them was in the 1950s.

The fact that no-one saw them while helicopters were beating the bush during the goldrush red deer helicopter hunting years counts against them, but my pet theory is that moose love water, and there's plenty of swamps in Fiordland (if there's a flat bit, it's probably a swamp) to hide from helicopters in.

New Zealand. Home to all sorts of weird-ass birds and bugs, but moose are considered cryptids there.

I love how big the world is sometimes.

We even have our own Sasquatch. A fun game is telling foreign hikers in our backcountry huts that the terrifying noises they're hearing at night is a Maero[1]. They're actually from an unwanted Australian overstayer, the brushtail possum[2], but cannibalistic wild men is a lot more fun.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maero

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70n88xAdmo0

It's upside-down in more ways than one, apparently.

Do you not have hunters in NZ? In the US any actual cryptid would be caught on someone's trail cam, eventually.

There is plenty of hunters in NZ, there is even a wikipedia page on hunting in NZ I just discovered.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunting_in_New_Zealand

And TV, Hunting Aotearoa: https://www.maoritelevision.com/shows/hunting-aotearoa

Great stuff, in a mix of Māori and laid back NZ English.

Yep, I hunt myself, mainly red deer and fallow, with the occasional chamois/pig/wallaby/rabbit/hare as I go.

Plenty of hunters, but moose were released in the most difficult terrain in NZ - Fiordland.

A mere moose pales in comparison to the legendary CANTERBURY PANTHER

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