Ostrich

Ostriches are birds of open spaces. They live across the savannas, semi arid plains and scrublands of sub Saharan Africa, with relict groups hanging on in parts of the Sahara and the Sahel. They avoid dense woodland and high rainfall, preferring terrain where their eyesight gives them early warning of a predator. In the Sahel and the Horn of Africa they survive in country that is extremely dry, taking enough food and water from sparse vegetation. The range once reached the Arabian Peninsula, where the Arabian ostrich was hunted to extinction by the mid twentieth century. Today the largest numbers are in eastern and southern Africa, across Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, Namibia and South Africa. Farmed birds have also gone feral in Australia, where a small population has survived in the South Australian outback since the feather trade collapsed.

Plant matter makes up the bulk of an ostrich's diet, but these birds are flexible. Grasses, seeds, roots, leaves and flowers are the staples, and they forage steadily through the day across large areas of ground. Given the chance they also take insects, small lizards and other small animals for protein. Ostriches have no teeth, so they swallow stones and grit that sit in the gizzard and grind down tough plant material; a bird can carry more than a kilogram of stones at a time. An adult gets through several kilograms of vegetation a day. They can also go long stretches without drinking, pulling moisture straight out of the plants they eat, which is what makes life possible in the driest parts of their range.

Social and alert, ostriches move in loose groups of five to fifty birds, and larger gatherings form on open plains. Their eyesight is extraordinary: at about 50 millimeters across, they have the largest eyes of any land animal, and they can pick out a lion from kilometers away. When danger closes in the first response is to run, and at full speed an ostrich covers up to 5 meters in a single stride and outpaces nearly every predator in its environment. If cornered it kicks forward with its two toed feet, and the kick lands with enough force to kill. Each foot carries a heavy claw on the inner toe that does most of the damage. Groups often feed alongside zebras and antelopes, an arrangement that suits everyone: the mammals have the better sense of smell and the ostrich has the better eyes.

Ostriches do not bury their heads in the sand, and no ostrich ever has. The bird would suffocate, which is reason enough, but the myth has a plausible source: an ostrich nest is a shallow pit scraped in the ground, and several times a day a parent pushes its head into that pit to turn the eggs. From a distance, on shimmering open ground, it looks exactly like a head disappearing into the sand. A second source is the bird's own alarm behavior. A sitting ostrich that has been spotted will sometimes flatten its neck and head along the ground to lower its profile, and at 2 meters tall it has a lot of profile to hide. The idea that the bird hides from danger by refusing to look at it is a human invention, first written down by Pliny the Elder in the first century and repeated ever since. What an ostrich actually does when threatened is run, and if running is not an option, kick.

Breeding season varies by region, but the pattern holds. A dominant male scrapes a shallow nest and mates with a main female, the major hen, while other females, the minor hens, lay in the same pit. The communal clutch usually holds about 20 eggs and can reach sixty, more than the pair can physically cover, so the major hen pushes the eggs she recognizes as her own into the center and lets the outer ones go. The two share incubation in shifts that match their colors: the brown female sits by day, the black male by night. After 35 to 45 days the chicks hatch, already the size of a chicken. They can run within days, and broods often merge into creches of a hundred or more chicks shepherded by one or two adults, which is how a single pair sometimes appears to be escorting an improbable crowd.

An ostrich egg is the largest laid by any living bird: about 15 centimeters long, 13 wide and 1.4 kilograms, the equivalent of more than twenty chicken eggs. Measured against the bird that lays it, though, it is the smallest egg of all, barely 1 percent of the female's body weight. The shell is around 2 millimeters thick and strong enough to take the weight of an adult standing on it, which is why a hatching chick needs hours of work to break out and why cooks crack the egg with a drill or a saw rather than a knock on the counter. Hard boiling one takes about 90 minutes. Farm eggs sell to restaurants and novelty buyers, usually for somewhere between 30 and 100 US dollars depending on country and season, and empty shells have been carved and used as water containers in southern Africa for tens of thousands of years, among the oldest containers known anywhere.

Ostrich farming started in the Little Karoo of South Africa in the 1860s, when feathers were worth more by weight than most metals and the town of Oudtshoorn built mansions on the trade. The fashion collapsed around the First World War, and the industry rebuilt itself around leather and meat: ostrich skin is one of the most valuable leathers in the world, and the meat is red, lean and low in fat. Farms now operate in South Africa, Australia, the United States, China and across Europe. Ostrich riding is offered at some South African farms, and it is exactly as bad an idea as it sounds: the bird is not built to carry weight, riders are regularly thrown, and a startled ostrich kicks. Several farms have dropped it on welfare grounds. Nothing about a farmed ostrich is tame, which is also why most serious ostrich injuries to humans happen on farms rather than in the wild.

The IUCN lists the common ostrich as Least Concern: the species as a whole remains widespread and reasonably stable. The picture is uneven, though. Numbers have fallen sharply across West Africa and the Sahel, where hunting and the steady loss of habitat to farming and settlement press on small, isolated groups, and the North African subspecies, Struthio camelus camelus, has disappeared from most of its former range and is now the focus of reintroduction projects in Morocco, Tunisia and Chad. Libya has lost its ostriches entirely. In southern Africa large numbers live on game farms and reserves, which cushions the species overall but says little about wild populations elsewhere. One clarification often missed: the birds of the Horn of Africa were split off in 2014 as a separate species, the Somali ostrich, which is listed as Vulnerable rather than Least Concern.