Pterodactyl Hunting Calibers

[Keith Rogan]

My first thought was a 10 gauge, 3 1/2" Magnum with OOO Buck, but then I thought, nah, maybe a FAL for extra range. What do you guys think? How fast does a pterodactyl fly and how far would you lead it?


Southwest Alaskans see bird they say is Super Cub-sized

http://adn.com/alaska/story/1979660p-2066841c.html

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?"

[kdubya]

Saw this on another forum, Keith -

IMHO the thing is the Mother breeder for all the nits, gnats, black flies, skeeters and no-see-ums that are so ever present up in that country. This sighting is the Mother out aerial spraying the eggs for next year's hatch!

[Al Thompson]

We have the same "couldn't happen here" syndrome when the locals report a cougar. All the wildlife folks have hissy fits when some unwashed local dares to challenge their wisdom.

Problem is, I've seen a couple and my suggestion to the wildlife folks to go look falls on deaf ears.

Keith, sounds like a mission for a FAL or M1A to me.. Drill the kids in reloading magazines and passing them forward...

[muleshoe]

"A Dillingham pilot says he spotted the creature while flying passengers to Manokotak last week."

If this critter is taking on passengers he's probably registered with the FAA.

[C.R.Sam]

So far...
I'd go for an overly large Steller's Sea Eagle.
And a bit of overestimation of size by the sighters.

Normal Steller's is enough bigger than an average Bald to be notable. Get a really big one and one could lose perceptive.

Sam

[brownlow]

I'd still go for M60 as an adequate weapon for close-in work.

Though JWB's old M1 would still be a favorite.

WGBV

[Keith Rogan]

Yeah, I'm sure it's a Steller's Sea Eagle. We had one here in Kodiak a few years back, though I never saw it myself. It is odd though that this thing is being seen far inland away from the normal coastal habitat. Probably fishing the late salmon runs up the river.
I wish it was a Pterodactyl though, just so a few PETA types could come up to "protect" it and get dragged away as pterodactyl chow.

Gotta go practice my wing shooting just in case....

[Dr.Rob]

Looked up photos of that bird, seems like it only nests in Eastern Russia, ie Kamchatka.

Maybe now that the cold war is over its taking a look at life in the land of the free. Gorgeous bird. Read up on it a bit, apparently these things are big enough to kill and eat small seals, though most of their diet is large birds and salmon.

No matter what it is, its certainly a sight.

Any possibility its a Condor?

[nondescript]

http://sped2work.tripod.com/thunderbirds.html

The coelecanth was thought long dead, and I believe that the longest wingspan of a modern bird was an Albotross at around eleven feet across.
Maybe, just maybe........

[Nannuk]

There have been several sittings of the "mythical" Thunderbird (and various other names) in the past. I tried a search on google to get some info for this, but all that came up were stories about cheap wine Anyway, I remeber seeing a television show about cryptozoology recently that mentioned these. Supposedly they are sooooo large that the can only fly on the massive upcurrents of thunder heads. Their range is reported to extend from Peru to Idianna. These things are supposed to have twenty+ feet wingspans. One gent in Mexico claims to have witnessed one of his children carried off by one. Another man in Mex says that he fired a shotgun at one to scare it off and it worked.

Anyway, a long way to go to recomend a twelve guage autoloader w/o the migratory bird mag block and wait for a close shot.

Nannuk

[Art Eatman]

Nannuk, my problem with the notion that some bird can only fly in updrafts from thunderstorms is that, "How do he eat?" "When do he eat?" "How do he not starve?"

If the metabolic rate is so slow he can not need food during the calm season of no thunderstorms, "How do he fly?"

The real-world problem for a bird with an exceptional wing-span is that of launching from flat ground. I was on Midway Island in 1949, and saw Gooney Birds in action. Once in flight, they're the majestic Albatross, but on the ground? They run as fast as they can to get enough airspeed for liftoff...The young, during the learning phase, spend a lot of time rolling tail over tea-kettle.

Art

[C.R.Sam]

Gooneys geared too tall for decent acceleration.

One was becalmed on hangar roof. At great risk to body, it was launched over the side. Instead of spreading wings and truckin on, it folded em up tight and crashed....DOA. Would be saviour was badly beaked and clawed.

Nuther logical plan that failed.

Sam