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
Tropical boubou more than a dozen meters up in a tree top; typically, however, it is built around 3 m in a bush, a horizontal branch fork, or in vines. Nesting sites are often solitary bushes, which provide cover while allowing the incubating bird to observe the surrounding terrain for threats. The female lays three, sometimes two eggs, which are bluish to buff green with brown and lilac spots and measure around 22–27 by 17–19 mm, or about 25 by 18.3 mm on average. Both parents incubate, but the female does most of the work. The eggs hatch after 14–16 days, and