Years ago we lived in a country home in Northern
California. Just across the road was a family that raised emus,
large flightless birds from Australia. According to
my creative daughter, their dark and vaguely sinister faces looked like
terrorists.
Photo Courtesy of Don at Mushroom Adventures
Additionally, and this seems very strange to me now, next
door to us another family raised rheas, large flightless birds from South America.
What I remember most about them was an otherworldly booming noise they made
that was more felt than heard. But I must have heard it as well, because I
remember three low and sliding notes in an unchanging pattern. It was a little
creepy.
I’m not sure what either family intended to do with these
gigantic birds, but one day I saw my next door neighbor racing around in his
back yard trying to catch one of the rheas.
It was a comical scene. Bob, middle aged and pot bellied,
was chasing the nimble footed bird- yelling and cursing at the top of his lungs
and sliding in the smelly mass of rhea dung that was now his backyard. I talked
to his wife later who told me he was trying to catch one to butcher.
It seems their rhea
population explosion with the resultant smell and noise led them to attempt a
little herd thinning. Notice I used the word “attempt”. Eventually they sold
their rheas, but not before some had escaped into the countryside. Perhaps there
are still “feral” rheas in the Sierra Nevada foothills
today.
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