Big Bird May Have Buzzed East Bay

Mysterious SF here with another one from the archives, courtesy the San Francisco Chronicle, Wednesday, January 14th, 1976.

Big Bird May Have Buzzed East Bay

By George Murphy

Did Big Bird stop over in the East Bay on his way to terrorize Texas?

He might well have, said a Walnut Creek businessman yesterday.

The odds are there's no such thing as a Big Bird, said a San Francisco ornithologist.

Whether there is such a thing as Big Bird or not, along the Rio Grande valley in south Texas there have been numerous reported sightings of a bird with a reported wingspan of 15 feet, and with feet (three-toed) nine inches wide and twelve inches long.

The footprints were discovered by employees of Harlingen, Tex., TV station, the station said.

When yesterday's Chronicle reported the Big Bird story, Lloyd King, who lives in the Northgate section of Walnut Creek, was heartened to come forward.

"It was in early October," he recalled. "I never saw anything like it in my life."

"There's a eucalyptus tree, about 100-150 feet high in a box canyon near my house, and I happened to look up, and there was this huge bird sitting on top of the tree.

"He made the tree look like a bush. He was at least five feet high, and he just sat there. I called my children and the neighbors, and we looked at it through binoculars.

"The bird sat there for about five minutes, then it just sort of glided away, like you'd imagine something prehistoric doing. The wingspan was about 15 feet. It was enormous. It was sort of a motley gray in color."

At the California Academy of Sciences, Laurence Binford said "the hardest thing for an amateur to do is to estimate the wingspan of a bird in flight, because there are no reference points in the sky. there's nothing larger or smaller than the bird with which to compare size."

While California and Texas are bird flyways, they are different flyways, Binford said.

He suggested that what might have been seen in Walnut Creek was a blue heron, which is bluish white and has a wingspread of about five feet.

King said he and his family checked reference books and saw "a picture of a sand crane, which looks like the bird we saw."

Binford said: "I've never heard of a sand crane."

King's description of Big Bird was dispassionate compared with that given police of Brownsville, Tex., by Alverico Guajardo, who said it was "a strange animal, four feet tall, with eyes like silver dollars, wings like a bird, and a face like a bat."

King said Big Bird at first "looked like a condor, or a stork." He said the Texas descriptions--some of them at least--"fit exactly the description of the bird we saw."

Source: San Francisco Chronicle, January 14, 1976

Publicly, Mysterious SF says: this is the only known Bay Area sighting of what cryptozoologists refer to as "Thunderbirds". Most sightings take place in the Midwest. 

Privately, Mysterious SF says: obviously the eyewitness, Mr. King, was referring to a "Sand Hill Crane". Sand Hill Cranes are quite well known. So it's kind of baffling that Binford, the ornithologist (who Google hints is still around and kicking) had never heard of a "Sand Crane". An early example of snark, perhaps?