This article by Ray Spitzenberger first appeared in Images for East Bernard Express, 1 Sep 2022.
It’s interesting how a memory will briefly flash through your mind. A vision of a cartoon depicting an ostrich with its head buried in the sand just blinked in my mind’s eye. It was a cartoon I originally saw as a child and wondered at the time what the creature was. The words accompanying the drawing read, “Don’t hide your head in the sand like an ostrich.” What a strange bird, I thought.
It was years later before I learned that the idea of an ostrich burying its head in the sand out of fear was a myth. Actually, when it’s afraid, the ostrich just lies as flat as it can on the ground. It digs shallow holes with its beak to create nests for its eggs, — so if you see an ostrich with his head in the sand, it’s just moving its eggs around in the nest.
Probably this recent memory flash was caused by a poem/story I was writing about an “ostrich” almost attacking me, a story which my wife helped me get straight.
One day about thirty years ago, my wife and I were driving the back roads of Texas and came upon an “ostrich” farm. We could see nothing but trees and a meadow, and I wanted to see an “ostrich,” so I started climbing over the fence. Just as the huge bird came running toward me like a locomotive, I managed to drop down on the safe side of the fence. That was one angry-looking bird!
Peggy reminded me that there were many “emu” farms in Texas in the 1990’s, but Texans weren’t raising ostriches. The healthy-eating craze of the era triggered the idea for the new “red meat” of the emu replacing beef, no fat and healthier. Although a bird, the emu has a protein in its system called “myoglobin” which makes the meat “red.” In the 1990’s, people thought emus might put the beef providers out of business.
For some reason the emu farm experiment failed, but there are still emus in Texas, and beef still remains supreme.
So apparently, I had gotten the facts of my story/poem wrong, teaching me to research before I write. The ostrich is native to Africa, whereas the emu is native to Australia. Yes, they do look a lot alike, but the ostrich has only two toes on each foot (the only bird in existence with only two toes) and the emu has three toes. You could have fooled me! Most birds have four toes!
I was further surprised that there are more flightless birds in the world than just these two. There is the “rhea” in South America, the kiwi” in China, the “ratite” in Australia, and the “cassowary” in New Guinea and in northern Australia. Bird-watching this group of feathered creatures might be a tad more dangerous than looking for wrens, sparrows, and larks.
I still love all birds, but I’m afraid of whatever charged after me back then when I tried to climb the fence. I still think it was an ostrich. I didn’t have time to count its toes!
-o-
Ray Spitzenberger is a retired Wharton County Junior College teacher, a retired Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod pastor, and author of three books, It Must Be the Noodles, Open Prairies, and Tanka Schoen.