Emus and Ostriches

ThylacineAlive said:
Is there even proof of ostriches breeding in the wild in Australia?
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Pretty sure there have been sightings of young - at least near Barham.

My Dad wrote a blog entry back in 2009 reporting that someone on the Birding-Aus mailing list had sighted a pair of Ostriches with 9 chicks on Mt Arden Station near Port Augusta (quite a bit further north than Emeroo) - so it seems like there may be at least one group breeding in that area still (albeit 10 years ago).

The Port Augusta population has to be at least 40 years old - since it was there when I started school. My Dad tells me that one of the other teachers at the school he worked at was living at Emeroo station where they were kept (about 15km north east of Port Augusta). That would have been in the late 70's / early 80s. I'm not sure when they stopped farming there.

The original Ostrich farm there was started in the 1880s and there are photos from 1913 in the SA State Library: ostrich farm port augusta • Find • State Library of South Australia ... but I believe the farming was stopped at some point after that before being started again in the 1970s - which would be the population I recall seeing growing up.

Recent news article about Ostriches - The outback ostriches — Australia's loneliest birds ... they also assert that most of the sightings would be from escaped Ostriches from the farms rather than wild born.

Newspaper article from 1888 about the Ostrich farm near Port Augusta: THE PORT AUGUSTA OSTRICH FARM. - The South Australian Advertiser (Adelaide, SA : 1858 - 1889) - 13 Feb 1888

Interestingly, the area near Emeroo is now used for farming solar energy - with a huge solar farm being build there: Bungala Solar Power Project - Wikipedia
 
There are a few online news articles which say that feral ostriches exist or existed in the US (California and Texas), but nothing beyond anecdotes (and no records on eBird).
 
Zoovolunteer said:
in a related topic, has anyone here seen the feral rheas in Germany?
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I have, and it's not that hard due to some of them (including white specimens) quite frequently roaming the open fields that surround the A20 Autobahn between Wismar and Lübeck.
 
I just remembered that there is a free-roaming population of emus on the Chatham Islands. It is currently impossible to say how close they are to being genuinely wild, because literally no formal research on the population has been carried out.
 
Daktari JG said:
emus are also exceptionally stupid (as in no capacity to learn) maybe not as much as turkeys
but they are annoyingly stupid
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Based on what experience? They're actually rather charming, dippy, and although not highly intelligent, are capable of training. Plus the young are super cute. In over 20 years working with them, I have never met an emu I didn't like.
 
Based on my personal experience. I'm sure you have a much larger sampling. Maybe I just
worked with a exceptionally stupid line of emus. :)
 
Personally with my experiences with emus they are basically just big bullies. At Phillip island wildlife park in the walkthrough red kangaroo and emu enclosure the emus immediately start jogging to the people st the gate especially if they have food. They get extremely close to you and raise their necks to be intimidating. It’s just plain scary, a couple even pecked me once. At least they don’t kick.
 
Just something interesting I heard recently - apparently in the late 90s and early 2000s in Texas, there was a big boom of people keeping Emus. They were seen as "wonder birds" that would produce huge eggs, great meat, and lots of features, all of which could be sold. However, when the stock market crashed, all the people keeping them realized there was no Emu market and turned them loose. Although breeding was never recorded, certain areas of Texas had large herds of Emu that wandered around from these releases. They seem to be gone now, though.
 
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