A Bird from Prehistory: Summer 1997

This is a story of mine. As a child of five, in the summer or late summer of 1997, I ventured out on my bicycle to the edge of our village. The road was ending abruptly behind the last house back then, giving way to open fields. It was there, amidst the tall grass, that I spotted an extraordinary creature. At first, it resembled a kiwi bird, familiar from the documentary shows on the TV but upon closer inspection, it was somewhat thinner and noticeably larger, perhaps the size of a young specimen of some bigger bird. I am an villager, so I know the species of birds around quite well and this was different than anything I've see before and after.

I now believe it was a juvenile Gastornis, an extinct genus of large, flightless birds that roamed Europe during the Paleocene to Eocene epochs, some 56 to 34 million years ago. Fossils of this prehistoric avian have been unearthed across Europe, North America, and Asia, with some species historically synonymised under names like Diatryma, though recent research debates this classification.
The bird I saw had feathers that were more yellowish than the deep brown used in the reconstructions of Gastornis, and its face and beak appeared yellow or yellowish. Which is also different from the Kiwi bird. It behaved curiously, as if searching for something while attempting to conceal itself in the grass.
As I dismounted my bicycle and approached, the creature initially tried to evade me slowly, hunkering down in the vegetation. But when I drew nearer, though never close enough to touch. It abandoned its hiding spot, where it did hid before, and fled across the open field. What haunts me most is how it vanished into thin air, right before my eyes, with no cover in sight. There was no logical escape; it simply disappeared. This sighting, impossible by palaeontological standards, felt eerily real, a glimpse of a relic from deep time inexplicably manifesting in the present.