May 13, 2009

Nightmare Bird

Jochen encountered this emu at a private farm in Germany. The emu is a very large flightless bird found throughout mainland Australia. It gets to over six feet in height.

A buddy of mine keeps a few of these on his ranch. A short while back one of them escaped from her enclosure and my buddy and his friend had to chase it along county roads in a truck (emus can sprint as fast as 31 mph). After a few miles the emu jumped an irrigation ditch and entered a residential neighborhood. They jumped out of the truck and chased it into a lady's backyard where they were able to corner it and bring it back to the truck.

That poor lady happened to be deathly afraid of birds. She had been in the backyard when the six-foot emu appeared, and she had stood frozen in terror as two strange men cornered the nightmare-made-flesh, said their apologies, and disappeared.

I don't know if she'll ever be the same.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sounds like the emu made her emo.

Unknown said...

lol what a terrible but funny tale

Anonymous said...

That's the equivalent of RW finding an escaped goliath birdeater spider on his toilet seat.

April Lorier said...

Did anyone else notice similarities between this emu's face and the face of an ostrich?

Peter Ørskov Madsen said...

They are also known as Great Australian Desert Chickens.

Raging Wombat said...

It would be exactly like that, finding a goliath birdeater.

Anonymous said...

I have a highly irrational fear of large birds... I don't really know why. Oddly enough, I was just talking about my phobia. :) Lol...

Unknown said...

As a person who is not a fan of birds, that would scare me, too!! This bird just looks mean.

Zaphod at Home said...

yeah so one time my brothers were smoking weed so they went down the street to their friends house. a couple minutes after they left they called me and started yelling "don't go outside there's an ostrich!". so i figure they're just being idiots so i happen to look out the back window and there's an ostrich running through the yard andit jumps over the fence. except i read in the paper a couple days later it was an emu escaped from a travelling petting zoo. So yeah also my brothers later told me they were heading down the street when the emu went to charge at them and chased them into a neighbors house. crazy stuff.