- Narrator: [about Haast's Eagle] The Maori soon discover their new found world is far larger than any islands their people have previously occupied. In fact New Zealand is a bigger landmass than all the Polynesian islands put together. Exploring the heavily forested interior it will not be long before they discover the islands top predator, a creature that will come to strike fear in the hearts of the Maori. The Haast eagle the largest and most deadly aerial predator the world has ever seen. It has a three meter wingspan, talons the size of tiger's claws that will crush the neck of a giant moa, a bird twenty times its weight. This is a specialist in crippling two-legged prey. When it first sets eyes on humans this pre-adapted man killer sees fare game. It swoops down on unsuspecting victims at speeds up to eighty kilometers per hour. This monstrous raptor remains by its kill for days. The Maori will speak of this giant carrying people away to feed its ravenous young.
- Narrator: [Last lines, about the Polynesians of Easter Island] Easter Island the remotest scrap of land on Earth, lost in the Pacific Ocean. Here proud monoliths lie in neglect abandoned by a Polynesian society in ruins. The forests felled the birds gone the soil eroded by farming and the wind. When the Polynesian arrived here in four hundred AD the island was covered in dense forest steadily was cleared to plant great gardens build canoes and erect these magnificent statues. Within a thousand years a culture that created the only written Polynesian language vanished collapsing into warfare cannibalism and environmental ruin. Here is the paradox of humans we are capable of such heroic and triumphant creations and yet we are also highly capable of perpetrating such horror on the rest of the natural world.
- Narrator: And so it is that the mammoth is not part of our world. Or the sabre-toothed cat, and the giant American Lions. They are now only ghosts. But are we at all haunted by their loss?
- Narrator: [about the Haast's Eagle hunting Maori settlers] For many thousands of years, its regular prey has been the giant flightless birds. But now, the eagle's eye has been caught by something different. It is big enough, it is walking upright on two legs, it is food.