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
Yellow-chinned spinetail The tubular entrance tunnel rises almost vertically from the base to the top of the nest. The normal clutch is three, sometimes four, greenish white eggs. This spinetail is parasitised by the striped cuckoo ("Tapera naevia"), which lays one or two eggs in the nest, but it is not known how the cuckoo enters the nest or whether it or its offspring eject the host's young. This widely ranging bird is not considered threatened by the IUCN. Yellow-chinned spinetail The yellow-chinned spinetail ("Certhiaxis cinnamomeus") is a passerine bird found in the tropical New World from Trinidad and Colombia south to