Elephant bird determined that "Vorombe titan" reached weights of and stood tall, making it the world's largest bird, slightly larger than the much older "Dromornis stirtoni". Elephant birds have been extinct since at least the 17th century. Étienne de Flacourt, a French governor of Madagascar in the 1640s and 1650s, mentions an ostrich-like bird said to inhabit unpopulated regions, though it is unclear whether he was repeating folk tales passed on from generations earlier. In 1659, Flacourt wrote of the "vouropatra – a large bird which haunts the Ampatres and lays eggs like the ostriches; so that the people of these places
Des Murs's wiretail to determine how wiretails find a mate. As is typical for south temperate insectivorous birds, during the breeding season of October to February Des Murs's wiretail lays a clutch of two to four eggs, but for the bird's mass these are about the largest eggs of any passerine bird. At long and wide, they weigh twice as much as expected for a 10 gram passerine and a clutch of four weighs more than the adult female - a feat equalled only by much more fecund kinglets. Little is known about incubation, fledging periods, or postfledging parental care due to the