Bird

The U.S. Air Force is a step closer to finally getting a replacement for its aging, unique LC-130H “Ski Bird” polar airlift aircraft. Between them, the Air Force and Pentagon have adjusted the budget to move forward on the recapitalization plan, which is seen as increasingly urgent, with the Arctic region, in particular, becoming an area of growing strategic importance.

The new disclosure comes from a Pentagon budget reprogramming document dated September 17, 2025. By law, the U.S. military has to seek approval from Congress to reallocate funding from one part of its budget to another.

The document states that funds of $29 million are to be realigned within the Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation, Air Force, 25/26, appropriation.

“This reprogramming action transfers funds within an appropriation for proper execution,” the document states. “The reclassification is required to execute funds properly in accordance with congressional intent. These actions are determined to be necessary in the national interest.”

The sum involved in the reprogramming action may seem small, but it is no less significant because of that. Essentially, this document is about moving money to fund work to develop the modifications (known as non-recurring engineering, or NDE) that will be needed to create the new LC-130J — a ski-equipped version of the much more modern C-130J airframe, in a new configuration that is still to be developed.

Administratively speaking, the reprogramming action has shifted money from a larger C-130 bucket into one focused on specialized variants of the Hercules, including HC-130Js, MC-130Js, and now LC-130Js.

Today, the ski-equipped LC-130H serves exclusively with the New York Air National Guard’s 109th Airlift Wing, home-stationed at Stratton Air National Guard Base. These aircraft are primarily used to resupply Arctic and Antarctic research stations and radar sites in the high Arctic, landing directly on ice and snowpack runways. The Air Force has flown these demanding missions since 1956 and began using earlier versions of the Hercules for the task in 1959.

The fleet of 10 LC-130Hs includes three that were converted from ex-Navy LC-130Rs; the most recent are three new-build aircraft that were completed in 1995–96. Since then, the aircraft have been upgraded with eight-bladed NP-2000 propellers, as well as digital cockpit displays, new flight managemenmc-1t systems, multifunction radar, and other improvements. The aircraft have also been reworked alongside other Air Force C-130Hs under the Avionics Modernization Program (AMP).

However, the LC-130Hs — some of which were built in the 1970s — are clearly showing their age, with only five out of the 10-strong fleet being mission-capable at any given time. Overall, the aircraft suffers from reliability issues and high maintenance costs. The problem is only getting worse, with all of the aircraft having parts that require total replacement, something that is now almost impossible since those components are no longer in production.

Congress has, for some time now, been pushing for a successor based on the C-130J.

Back in 2017, Inside Defense reported that the New York ANG was in talks with Lockheed Martin about a potential LC-130J to outright replace its older aircraft.

But it wasn’t until June of last year that the bipartisan Senate version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) allocated $290 million for the replacement of the two LC-130Hs with two new LC-130Js.

Chuck Schumer, who was then the Senate Majority Leader and who has been a prominent supporter of the LC-130H recapitalization, said: “We need the House to follow suit as we continue the fight to deliver this funding in end-of-year appropriations. There is no time to waste in delivering new ski-birds for the 109th, and I will continue to fight tooth and nail to secure this funding in the final bill.”

Schumer described the 109th Airlift Wing fleet as “critical to supporting the National Science Foundation’s polar research mission and maintaining U.S. presence and leadership in the Arctic and Antarctic.”

Schumer continued: “After more than three decades of year-round service in some of the harshest environments, these planes have been falling into disrepair and are in constant need of maintenance, threatening aircrew safety and their ability to execute their mission. That’s why for years I have been pushing the Air Force to recapitalize this essential fleet so new planes can land in the Capital Region.”

Meanwhile, Maj. Gen. Ray Shields, Adjutant General of the New York National Guard, said, “Obtaining two new LC-130J ‘Ski Bird’ aircraft in the FY 2025 NDAA is vital for our national security, and supports the Department of Defense’s Arctic Strategy, as well as the National Science Foundation missions in Antarctica and the Arctic.”

In August of last year, the Senate Appropriations Committee, a key congressional panel, outlined its demand for an LC-130H replacement, recommending funding for the LC-130J. The committee, in its mark of the fiscal year 2025 defense spending bill, called for $200 million to be added to begin work on the project, stating:

“The Committee notes the importance of polar tactical airlift capabilities for Arctic and Antarctic operations. Further, the Committee notes that the study conducted by the Secretary of the Air Force in coordination with the Commander, U.S. Northern Command, and Director, Air National Guard, titled “Fiscal Year 2023 LC-130 Report,” identifies improvements made in recent years to the LC-130H fleet currently conducting this mission. The study also notes that continual modernization investments and performance enhancements will ensure the relevance and viability of this aircraft and its future mission. However, the Committee understands that this report may not fully take into account the operational activity of these aircraft.”

At this stage, it is unclear if funding for the two LC-130Js included in the FY 2025 NDAA has been appropriated, but the recent budget reprogramming document at least indicates that the Pentagon has been looking to use existing funding to get the ball moving on the project.

Proponents of the LC-130 and its mission point out that these aircraft are vital for maintaining and strengthening the United States’ presence, operations, and research in the Arctic and Antarctica.

The Arctic is a region of growing strategic importance, seen as an area in which the United States and its allies will face increasingly security challenges. Not only Russia, but also China is expanding its presence in the region.

Already, there is developing an increasingly strategic race to expand control and military influence across the Arctic region.

Russia is actively building up its military footprint in the wider region, with extensive efforts being made to establish a more permanent footprint above the Arctic Circle.

The Kremlin’s many investments in the region include increasing its air and naval power in the Arctic Circle, and the Russian military has been establishing new bases here, as well as reactivating ones that fell into disuse after the Cold War.

For some years now, Russia has enjoyed access to more than 50 airfields and ports in the Arctic region, from where it is able to project air and naval power that could deny the United States and its allies access to the Arctic. Russian maritime activity in the region is also enabled to a significant degree by a large and growing fleet of icebreakers, which dwarfs those used by the United States and its allies combined.

And as the retreating ice caps open up new shipping routes as well as providing access to natural resources that were previously inaccessible, or at least much harder to exploit, the strategic importance of the Arctic region is only going to grow.

A relatively new player here is China, which has its eye on new shipping routes and natural resources. This has seen Beijing expanding its presence in the Arctic, and, in response to this, the Pentagon has defined the Arctic as “an increasingly competitive domain,” issuing specific warnings about China’s growing interest in the region.

Still, it’s by no means easy for the U.S. military to extend its reach over the Arctic in peacetime, let alone at war. It’s this reality that has driven interest in gaining control of Greenland, or at least expanding the U.S. military presence there, as you can read about here.

In the meantime, the existing LC-130H and the crews of the 109th are also adapting to this new reality.

Earlier this year, for example, an LC-130H touched down on freshwater ice for the first time in decades, reflecting the Air Force’s shift toward “defensive or offensive operations” in the Arctic. The Ski-Bird landed on Parsons Lake in Inuvik, Canada, in March, as part of a joint U.S.–Canadian exercise.

“We are excited to see what the future holds for the LC-130 Hercules and 109th Airlift Wing as we continue to evolve our capabilities in the Arctic,” Lt. Col. Matthew Sala, the 109th deployed commander, said in a release at the time.

Now, with the LC-130J on the horizon, the 109th Airlift Wing should be that much better equipped to support operations — whether military or civilian — in the challenging Arctic and Antarctic regions.

Contact the author: [email protected]

HE was the down-to-earth Yorkshireman with one of the most famous gestures in sport.

The way cricket’s most famous umpire Dickie Bird gave batsmen their marching orders — lifting his arm, oh so slowly, index finger outstretched — became his trademark.

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Miner’s son Dickie, who has died at the age of 92, was as much a part of British summers as, well, the sound of bat on ball.

He will be remembered as the man whose popularity broke down the divide between the game’s officials and players — also winning him a huge army of fans way beyond the boundary rope.

Generation after generation watched as Dickie, real name Harold Dennis Bird, umpired 66 tests and 69 one-day internationals, including three World Cup finals, with fairness and humour while reining in the most cantankerous of players.

Dickie, who never married, is expected to leave his multi-million- pound fortune — most of it made when he published his autobiography in 1997 — to children’s hospitals which he often visited.

After his death was announced by Yorkshire County Cricket Club, tributes flooded in for the lord of LBW — when umpire adjudges ball to have hit leg before wicket.

A club statement read: “Dickie Bird enjoyed an illustrious career as an international umpire, writing his name into history as the most famous and popular official in the game’s history.

“He is synonymous with Yorkshire cricket, where he has been one of the most loyal supporters.”

The club named the former Yorkshire batsman as its president in 2014 and said it was a role he held with “pride and distinction” as the club won two country championships during his tenure.

It added that Dickie, awarded an MBE in 1986 and OBE in 2012, had become known “not only for his umpiring excellence but also his eccentricities and warmth”.

Leading the tributes was Yorkshire and England cricket great Sir Geoffrey Boycott.

‘Never officious’

The legendary opening batsman said of the umpiring great: “Dickie was a character, always fun. He was respected, admired and loved. A cricket icon.

“He was brilliant because he made a lot of good decisions but also he had humour and a firmness. He could handle players.

“You could talk to him. He would listen. But chatting him up did not change his mind. No chance. He would laugh with you instead.

“He would never be officious. He just had a way of defusing situations. That was his strength, why he was rated all over the world as the best.”

Boycott first met Dickie in 1955, when they played for Barnsley Cricket Club — and the pair were also friends there with another Yorkshireman who later found fame, the late TV host Sir Michael Parkinson. The three would remain pals for life.

He added of Dickie’s cricket: “I was slightly in awe, nearly every time he went out to bat he would score a 50.

“I was shocked when he would come up to me and say, ‘Put my gloves on for me, Gerald’. I would say, ‘My name’s not Gerald, it’s Geoffrey’. It made no difference because he would say, ‘OK, put the gloves on for me Gerald’. He called me Gerald for years.

Former England captain and opening bat Graham Gooch also has fond memories of Dickie — a­nd the time one of his shots struck him during a match against Australia at Old Trafford in 1985.

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Gooch told talkSPORT: “He tried to get out of the way of the straight drive but it hit him on the ankle. He wasn’t averse to making a bit of a song and dance about things — and he had to go off for treatment.”

Dickie was also in the middle when Gooch played his most famous innings — scoring 333 against India at Lord’s in 1990.

But Gooch added: “Things always happened to Dickie in the field. At Headingley, once they had a leaking pipe, right where he was standing, coming up like a sprinkler. It could only happen to him.”

BBC cricket correspondent Jonathan Agnew said of Dickie: “He was a terrific umpire, the players loved him.”

Others taking to social media to pay respects ranged from ex-Prime Minister David Cameron to former Liverpool and Nottingham Forest striker Stan Collymore.

Dickie was born in Barnsley — where he still lived before his death, although he swapped a two-up, two-down terrace with outside toilet for a luxury 16th-century four-bedroom cottage on the edge of the Pennines.

His dad Harold worked in the coal mines from the age of 13 until 65, but wanted better for his son.

Dickie was a character, always fun. He was respected, admired and loved. A cricket icon.

Sir Geoffrey Boycott

Dickie said: “My father would not let me go down the mine. ‘No way!’ he said. He instilled in me that I would play sport for a living.

“He would get up at four each day and go to the pit and when he came home in the afternoon, although tired, would spend hours with me playing cricket and football.”

Dickie’s teenage years at Barnsley Cricket Club were happy ones, as were the friendships he made with Boycott and Parkinson.

He wept as he recalled his final conversation with Parky, the day before his friend’s death in August 2023, aged 88.

Dickie said: “We cracked a few jokes together, we had a few tears in our eyes and we said goodbye, goodbye to each other at the end of the phone call as if we had this feeling that we wouldn’t see each other again and we said goodbye and that was it.

“It was so sad when I heard the news [of his death]. I slumped in my chair and shed tears.”

Another childhood pal was Tommy Taylor, the England and Manchester United centre forward, who died in the Munich air crash of 1958.

Two years earlier, Dickie had made his first-class debut for Yorkshire as a right-hand batsman.

Fervent royalist

He left the club after three years, and spent three more years with Leicestershire before a knee injury forced him to hang up his bat and he switched to umpiring.

He became the first umpire to attract queues of autograph hunters and was so popular with the females that women hung pairs of pants on his statue in his home town.

So popular was he in Barnsley that a local car dealership gave him a motor emblazoned with his name, urging drivers to follow him to their showroom. On the driver’s side they painted him sat at the wheel in his umpiring whites.

Dickie was a fervent royalist who met Queen Elizabeth II 29 times and remembered the time he had lunch with her in 1990.

He also told how he was so nervous about lunch that he turned up at the gates of Buckingham Palace more than four hours early.

He said: “The Queen laughed when I told her and said, ‘You better have a drink’.

“Prince Edward joined us, we had a magnificent lunch, and then it was just the Queen and I in the lounge all afternoon.

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“She had a lovely sense of humour. We talked about cricket and horse racing. She said, ‘We think the world of you and we think you do a good job’. That were the best day of my life.”

The pair then kept in touch. “I had a letter from her a fortnight before she died,” Dickie said after her death in September 2022, aged 96.

“She asked about my health, ‘How are you keeping?’, I used to write back and say, ‘You need to keep going, Ma’am. You’ve got to get there — 100 if you can.

“She was the rock of this country. Magnificent.”

It was just the Queen and I in the lounge all afternoon. We talked about cricket and horse racing. She said ‘We think the world of you and we think you do a good job’. That were the best day
of my life.

Dickie Bird

Dickie was an ambassador for the Children’s Heart Surgery Fund at Leeds General Infirmary and is expected to leave his money to kids’ hospitals after being reduced to tears during visits across the UK.

It is not known how big his estate is but humble Dickie — who counted a £5 glass of wine at his local restaurant as a treat — donated £35,000 to London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital, £70,000 to Barnsley Hospital and £30,000 to the children’s fund at Leeds General.

He said: “When I visit these hospitals and see sick little babies needing surgery, or cut from their groin to their neck after heart operations, I break down in tears. I am not ashamed to admit it.”

His money-spinning, self-titled autobiography sold more than a book about Princess Diana, after her death the same year.

But ever-modest Dickie said: “Never in my wildest dreams did I think it would go to the bestsellers’ list, and beat even Diana’s book.”

His devotion to cricket left little time for much else, and he admitted he regretted never marrying and having children.

He said during the Covid lockdown: “If I miss having something in life, it’s having a family. I’ve had girlfriends. I nearly married twice. But I never married because in cricket you are never at home. I thought it would never work.

“It would have been wonderful to have a lad and watch him play. I missed that. But you can’t have everything. I gave myself to cricket, and it has given me a real good life.”

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In “Task,” premiering Sunday on HBO, Brad Ingelsby, creator of the 2021 miniseries “Mare of Easttown,” which introduced the wider world to Wawa and the Delco accent, returns with another tale of crime and family in the rural-suburban wilds west of Philadelphia. Where women were at the center of “Mare,” men are the subject here — a cop and a criminal, symmetrically arranged — messed-up middle-aged single fathers who care about their kids.

Both have been loaded with tragedy. Robbie (Tom Pelphrey), whose wife took off a year before, has a much-missed dead brother in whose house he’s living with his two kids and young adult niece (Emilia Jones as Maeve, a secret hero); he’s a garbage collector with a sideline in robbing drug houses, which he identifies through their trash. This routine has been successful enough that he and his partner, fellow trashman Cliff (Raúl Castillo), have drawn the attention of the authorities.

FBI agent Tom (Mark Ruffalo) has a dead wife (Mireille Enos, seen briefly in flashback), a son in jail he can’t bring himself to visit and a semi-estranged adult daughter (Phoebe Fox); on leave from field work, he’s been manning the agency table at job fairs. That changes when his boss (Martha Plimpton), much to his displeasure, calls him back as a substitute to lead a task force into the drug house robberies, already assembled by his predecessor from other branches of law enforcement. There’s Lizzie (Alison Oliver), young and distractable; Aleah (Thuso Mbedu), terse and focused; and Anthony (Fabien Frankel), loose and Italian.

It’s clear from the guns that both sides pack, and the fact that Robbie has been stealing from criminals — notably a drug-dealing motorcycle gang, the Dark Hearts, which has its own explosive internal business — that something is going to go fatally wrong sooner or later. (If that’s a spoiler, you are blessed with a special brand of naivete.) The bikers, who are not at all nice, though painted with some recognizably human qualities — represented primarily by Jamie McShane as Perry and Sam Keeley as Jayson — are the usual screen collection of exclusively good-looking men and women, though to be fair, this is true of Tom’s team too — Tom perhaps excepted. (Ruffalo put on weight for the role, and wants you to notice.)

In “Task,” Robbie (Tom Pelphrey) is a single father who steals from other criminals.

(Peter Kramer / HBO)

Indeed, the predominant experience of watching “Task” is waiting for the next terrible thing to happen, which may be called suspense or dramatic tension, but in the event makes for an often depressing watch, especially since the safety (physical, psychological) of young children is involved. (That can feel a little cheap, dramaturgically, like endangering a kitten, but it works.) One is grateful for anything relatively ordinary — Lizzie and Anthony dancing in a bar, Tom’s younger daughter, Emily (Silvia Dionicio) connecting with a co-worker at the custard ice stand. (Another item for the regional reference bucket.)

In the compare-and-contrast structure of the series, we learn that Robbie, though he is a fount of bad decisions, is the more optimistic, proactive of the two characters — he has a dream, in the form of a brochure, regarding a Canadian island, where he would like to spirit his family away. (He’s doing the crime to afford it.) He’s interested enough in finding “a life companion” to open a dating app. Tom, who had been a priest for eight years before losing the spirit and joining the FBI, still in mourning for his wife, drinks too much, is packing a paunch and can’t connect with Emily, the only family member left in the house.

Both have connections to nature. Tom, who grows vegetables, is a birdwatcher; Robbie keeps chickens. Both are essentially tenderhearted, which is perhaps not the most practical quality for their professions, but necessary for the story — we need to like them. They’re like one and a half sides of the same coin.

In among the criminal antics and police work is a lot of talk about life and death and God, guilt and forgiveness. Ingelsby thinks big. The title to one episode, “Out Beyond Ideas of Wrongdoing and Rightdoing There Is a River,” paraphrases the 13th century Persian poet Rumi, and water is a motif — diving into it, swimming in it, hanging around by it. Birds, too, which show up in random shots and, like the lakes and rivers, function as a sort of psychic relief for the viewer and metaphors for the story. When Tom, speaking to Robbie, identifies a certain bird as a “vagrant … a bird that strayed outside its normal range, strayed so far that it’s forgotten how to find its way home,” that is not really about birds. The writing can be a little on the nose, but better a violent story with ideas than one with none.

For all my reservations when it comes to this sort of drama, it’s very well made and very well acted, and, where many crime stories settle for sensational nihilism, “Task” does want to leave you feeling … pretty good. Not horrible. Hopeful. I trust that hasn’t spoiled it for you.

The federal government has paid California dairy farms more than $230 million to subsidize losses in milk production resulting from bird flu, records show, an amount that the dairy industry expects to climb higher as more claims for damages are processed.

The H5N1 bird flu has swept through more than 75% of California’s 1,000 dairy farms since August 2024, sickening cattle and leading to steep dropoffs in milk production.

Farmers were able to get relief under a U.S. Department of Agriculture program known as the Emergency Assistance for Livestock, Honeybees and Farm-Raised Fish Program, or ELAP. The program usually provides assistance for farmers impacted by wildfires, drought and flooding but was opened up for dairy farmers last year as bird flu began ravaging their cows.

U.S. Department of Agriculture records show that 644 payments were made to 359 California dairy farms between November 2024 and June 2025 totaling $231 million. The average per farm payment was about $645,000, and ranged from $2,058 to the Pereira Dairy Farm, in Visalia, to $4.4 million to Channel Islands Dairy Farm, in Corcoran.

Those payments are expected to go much higher, however, as more claims are submitted and processed. Many of the payments issued in May and June were for outbreaks in 2024, suggesting there are more to come.

The relief payments were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by Farm Forward, a nonprofit group that advocates against factory farming. The group asserts that the subsidies help prop up industrial-scale dairy operations that perpetuate the spread of bird flu.

“These are mega industrial operations that are fueling an outbreak,” said Andrew deCoriolis, Farm Forward’s executive director. “Bird flu spreads in exactly the kinds of environments that we’re paying to preserve.”

Anja Raudabaugh, the chief executive of the industry’s largest state trade group, Western United Dairies, said the payments have “ensured our dairy communities and their workers stay employed and healthy. Until we get approval of a dairy cow vaccine, weathering this storm has only been possible with the assistance of the milk loss payments.”

Jonathan Cockroft, managing partner of Channel Islands Dairy Farms, said while the payments helped with the roughly 30% drop in milk production his farm experienced, his losses exceed the $4 million he received.

He said the virus caused cows to abort their pregnancies, and often prevented them from getting pregnant again. A dairy cow that doesn’t give birth doesn’t produce milk. In other cases, he said the udders were so scarred by the disease that the cows were unable to produce milk at levels prior to infection.

“There’s a whole other version I’m not sure the public understands, which is the huge impact on reproduction,” he said.

He also noted many animals died — especially when the outbreak first hit last fall, and the newness of it combined with the blazing heat of the Central Valley felled 10% to 15% of many California herds.

Joey Airoso, a dairy farmer in Tipton, received a $1.45-million subsidy for an outbreak at his farm last October.

He said the outbreak has cost him more than $2 million “just on milk income and that does not include the over $250,000 of extra care costs” required to treat cows with medicines, extra staffing and veterinary consultations.

And it doesn’t cover the cost of the cows that died — which can’t produce milk or be sold for meat. The average dairy cow costs about $3,500, Cockroft said.

Jay Van Rein, a spokesperson for California’s Department of Food and Agriculture, said the loss payments are “the most realistic way for producers to recover and to avoid huge disruptions in the food supply of these products.”

USDA officials didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, but a former top USDA official who left the agency in January said it was important to provide dairy farmers relief once the agency identified H5N1 bird flu in a handful of Texas herds in March 2024. By then the disease had been spreading for weeks, if not months, making containment to one state impossible.

“This was a once-in-a-lifetime event, and we knew that we were going to need to support producers, and we knew that the quicker we could get some assistance out to them to help them test, the better off we were going to be, and the faster we’d be able to bring the infection under control,” he said.

Farm Forward’s DeCoriolis and others, however, say these programs perpetuate an agricultural industry designed around containing hundreds, if not thousands, of genetically similar animals into confined lots — veritable playgrounds for a novel virus. He also noted the federal relief programs don’t come with any strings attached, such as incentives for disease mitigation and/or biosecurity.

Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization in Canada, said handing out subsidies to farms without trying to understand or investigate the practices they are using to quash the disease is a mistake.

“What are they doing on the farms to prevent reinfection?” she said.

The USDA payments were based on a per cow milk production losses over a four-week period. According to Farm Forward’s data, several farms received more than one subsidy. While roughly half received just one payment, 100 farms received two payments, 58 received three, 19 received four and two received six separate payments.

At one farm in Tulare County, four USDA payments were submitted once a month between November 2024 and February 2025. At another, payments stretched from December 2024 to May 2025.

Rasmussen said the multiple payments most likely stemmed depending on specific circumstances at the dairies involved.

Cockroft of the Channel Islands Dairy said he and other farmers have seen waves of reinfection and milk tests that remain positive for months on end. He said he knew of a farm that was in quarantine for nine months.

When herds are quarantined, animals are not allowed to be transferred on or off site. In California, a farm is under quarantine for 60 days after initial virus detection. It can’t move out of quarantine until tests show its milk is virus-free — for three weeks in a row.

Van Rein, the state agriculture spokesperson, said the average time under quarantine is 103 days. He said that of the 1,000 herds in California, 940 are not under quarantine; 715 of those had previously been infected and released from quarantine.

A quarantined farm can still sell milk, however, even if the milk tests positive. Pasteurization has been shown to kill the virus.

The relief payments are another sign of how the U.S. government supports the agricultural industry, which is considered by some to be vital to the national interest.

“We’ve decided politically that this is an industry that we want to support, that was hit by something that obviously wasn’t their fault, and we’re going to help them, because it was a disastrous thing that hit the industry,” said Daniel Sumner, an agricultural economist at UC Davis. “If we thought about these payments as we’re using our tax money to help somebody who’s in need, because their family is poor, that’s not the case.”

WASHINGTON — Filmmaker Peter Jackson owns one of the largest private collections of bones of an extinct New Zealand bird called the moa. His fascination with the flightless ostrich-like bird has led to an unusual partnership with a biotech company known for its grand and controversial plans to bring back lost species.

Last week, Colossal Biosciences announced an effort to genetically engineer living birds to resemble the extinct South Island giant moa — which stood 12 feet tall — with $15 million in funding from Jackson and his partner, Fran Walsh. The collaboration also includes the New Zealand-based Ngai Tahu Research Center.

“The movies are my day job, and the moa are my fun thing I do,” Jackson said. “Every New Zealand schoolchild has a fascination with the moa.”

Outside scientists say the idea of bringing back extinct species onto the modern landscape is likely impossible, although it may be feasible to tweak the genes of living animals to have similar physical traits. Scientists have mixed feelings on whether that will be helpful, and some worry that focusing on lost creatures could distract from protecting species that still exist.

The moa had roamed New Zealand for 4,000 years until they became extinct around 600 years ago, mainly because of overhunting. A large skeleton brought to England in the 19th century, now on display at the Yorkshire Museum, prompted international interest in the long-necked bird.

An artist’s depiction of the largest species of moa, the South Island giant moa, which could stand 12 feet tall.

(Colossal Biosciences via AP)

Unlike Colossal’s work with dire wolves, the moa project is in very early stages. It started with a phone call about two years ago after Jackson heard about the company’s efforts to “de-extinct” — or create genetically similar animals to — species such as the woolly mammoth and the dire wolf.

Then Jackson put Colossal in touch with experts he’d met through his own moa bone collecting. At that point, he’d amassed 300 to 400 bones, he said.

In New Zealand, it’s legal to buy and sell moa bones found on private lands, but not on public conservation areas — nor to export them.

The first stage of the moa project will be to identify well-preserved bones from which it may be possible to extract DNA, Colossal’s chief scientist, Beth Shapiro, said.

Those DNA sequences will be compared with genomes of living bird species, including the ground-dwelling tinamou and emu, “to figure out what it is that made the moa unique compared to other birds,” she said.

Colossal used a similar process of comparing ancient DNA of extinct dire wolves to determine the genetic differences with gray wolves. Then scientists took blood cells from a living gray wolf and used the CRISPR gene-editing tool to modify them at 20 sites. Pups with long white hair and muscular jaws were born late last year.

Working with birds presents different challenges, Shapiro said.

Unlike mammals, bird embryos develop inside eggs, so the process of transferring an embryo to a surrogate will not look like mammalian IVF.

“There’s lots of different scientific hurdles that need to be overcome with any species that we pick as a candidate for de-extinction,” Shapiro said. “We are in the very early stages.”

If the Colossal team succeeds in creating a tall bird with huge feet and thick pointed claws resembling the moa, there’s also the pressing question of where to put it, said Duke University ecologist Stuart Pimm, who is not involved in the project.

“Can you put a species back into the wild once you’ve exterminated it there?” he said. “I think it’s exceedingly unlikely that they could do this in any meaningful way.”

“This will be an extremely dangerous animal,” Pimm added.

The direction of the project will be shaped by Maori scholars at the University of Canterbury’s Ngai Tahu Research Center. Ngai Tahu archaeologist Kyle Davis, an expert in moa bones, said the work has “really reinvigorated the interest in examining our own traditions and mythology.”

At one of the archaeological sites that Jackson and Davis visited to study moa remains, called Pyramid Valley, there are also antique rock art done by Maori people — some depicting moa before their extinction.

The South Island giant moa at 12 feet tall would dwarf even the tallest humans.

(Colossal Biosciences via AP)

Paul Scofield, a project advisor and senior curator of natural history at the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch, New Zealand, said he first met the “Lord of the Rings” director when he went to his house to help him identity which of the nine known species of moa the various bones represented.

“He doesn’t just collect some moa bones; he has a comprehensive collection,” Scofield said.

Larson writes for the Associated Press. The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.