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| "Don't shoot me, bro." The stare of the Shoebill Stork |
The bird in question was shot by a Mr. W.W. Adkins while out on a deer-hunting trip, just south of Hamlin in the Ranger area, near Vannater's Creek. According to Adkins' story, the bird had been circling in the sky before alighting on the water, where he was able to get a good shot at it. He got it in the wing, hoping to take it alive, but as it was overly aggressive, he had to finish the job. It took five bullets to finally bring the monster bird down.
Adkins and Midkiff measured the bird, which was 7 feet, 4 inches from tip to tip (I'm guessing wingspan), and 4 feet from the tip of its bill to the tip of its tail. Its bill was flat, like a duck's and measured 4 inches long and 3 inches wide. It had webbed feet located at the end of its 11-inch legs. The coloring was dark brown, with light blue highlights along the wings and breast.
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| Adult Shoebill |
I couldn't find any follow-up as to whether the creature was ever taxidermized, and if so, where it ended up. There's really not a good date as to when this actually happened, as the story leaves that detail out and the story literally ran in different newspapers over the span of at least 8 months. The newspaper article below is from February 1896, but the same article ran as late as October of that same year.
Out of curiosity, I searched the physical description given of the bird, and Google's best guess is that it might be a juvenile shoebill stork. While adults are usually a lighter gray color (possibly mistaken for light blue?), the juveniles are brown in color. These would be birds that have a HUGE duck-like bill, long legs, and webbed feet. I can't vouch for how aggressive they are, but if you look at pictures of these things, they just LOOK like they'd mess you up, especially after you SHOT them. The problem is, the shoebill stork is absolutely not native to West Virginia, or even the United States. Could a bird all the way from a limited geographical region in Africa make it to a little West Virginia town, or was this really some mysterious, unknown cryptid? Or...was the whole story simply a tale taller than the bird itself?
As we enter the final stretch to the annual Mothman Festival and are just a couple months out from the first wave of the 1966-67 Pt. Pleasant sightings, I love sharing additional stories of large, unknown bird-like creatures terrorizing the skies over the Mountain State. West Virginia has no shortage of strange creatures, on land, in water, or in the air.
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| The Bay City Times (Michigan) 4 February 1896 |
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