Subject: Re: Ostriches
Author:
Posted on: 2015-12-04 03:21:00 UTC

Honestly, most of the ones we have are more dumb than anything. Their single, driving instinct is to eat things, so they generally only have one, "is this edible" reaction to most stimuli.

We have nearly all females at my zoo; I've heard the males can be awful, but the one male we do have is pretty much no different from all the females. There is one female who is weirdly aggressive; fortunately, she's a much lighter shade of grey than everyone else. (Thank you, Gan, for color-coding the dangerous one!) One day, while I was volunteering with keepers who were cleaning their pond in the train ride yard, a bunch of ostriches all started walking into the empty pond in single file. We were almost done cleaning, so I started petting them as they walked by, and kept talking to the keepers. The ostriches continued by, oblivious to even being touched by me, until I got to the Grey One. She immediately flinched backwards and hissed, stared at me for a second in surprise, and then fluffed her wings out, hissed louder and charged. (They usually stamp their feet before they attack, but she did not do so.) I started to turn to run, and had time to see her foot kick about six inches to the side of my torso, where part of my body had been before I turned. (I yelled, "Help!" at some point, too, but don't really remember when.) I ran straight for the bridge that takes the train over the pond and jumped from one concrete support berm to the other—ostriches don't handle uneven ground very well— and nearly ran into a pair of Stanley cranes. The Stanleys are mean, too, but don't have the body mass to kill a human like ostriches do, so getting kicked by them would have been a very acceptable trade-off for escaping the Grey One, but the cranes were so shocked by a human showing such carelessness towards them, they just kind of stared at me, stunned. So then I jumped back to the first berm, where the ostrich had already wandered away due to lack of interest/food. When the zookeepers tell that story about me, they say I "outran an ostrich." Not seeing the ostrich herself after the kick, I can't really corroborate that, and it couldn't have been more than ten feet, but . . . I guess it is kind of impressive I avoided getting hurt?

But as I was saying, mostly ostriches nip at things to see if it's food. And sometimes, they nip at no things—they just stand there biting at air for minutes straight every once in a while. The problem with my hands is that in winter, my skin gets all dry and cracks apart, and I think the one ostrich thought the red spots on my hand were edible. And then she ended up adding to the red marks, where usually, their "bites" are just slight scratches that don't bleed.

And this morning, a Cape Barren goose landed a direct hit on the ostrich bite with the weaponized knob bone on his wrist, and made it hurt far more than the ostrich initially did. Have I mentioned birds are the absolute worst thing there is?

—doctorlit apologizes for answering your one-sentence question with this giant essay in the middle of your discussion about the wiki.

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