Strong powerful creatures they are, even in confinement. Yet how little can we picture to ourselves, when we see the Ostrich trotting round his paddock in the Zoological Gardens, with his wings outspread, what he is when he courses over the free desert!—
“Where the zebra wantonly tosses his mane,
With wild hoof scorning the desolate plain;
And the fleet-footed ostrich over the waste
Speeds like a horseman who travels in haste.”
There the soft pads under the two toes of each foot rebound from the yielding sand as his well-bent legs straighten with a jerk one after the other, making his body bound forward at full speed. Then he raises his wings, sometimes on one side, sometimes on both, to balance himself, and to serve as sails to help him; and with this help his stride is sometimes as great as twenty feet, and he dashes along at the rate of twenty-six miles an hour. He is not so heavy as he looks, for many, of his bones are hollow, his feathers are downy and soft, and his wing-bones are small; and it is to his featherless thighs that you must look for the strong muscles to which he trusts for all his speed, as with outstretched neck he bounds across the plain.
If we go back to long bygone times, before the lion, the leopard, and other ferocious animals found their way into Africa, we can imagine how this great running bird took possession of the land and became too heavy for flight; while as time rolled on, he gained that strength of body and leg which now is his great protection as he dashes along, his four or five wives following in his train. The ostriches can travel over wide distances from one oasis to another, feeding on seeds and fruit, beetles, locusts, and small animals, and fighting fiercely with legs and beak if attacked. And when the springtime comes the wives lay their eggs in a hole scooped in the sand, or often in some dry patch of ground surrounded by high grass, till sixteen or twenty are ready; and then they take their turn (the father among the rest) of sitting upon them, at least at night, even if they leave them to the heat of the sun by day. And when six weeks have passed the father grows impatient, and, pressing the large bare pad in front of his chest against each egg in turn, breaks it, pulls out the membranous bag with the young bird in it, shakes him out, and, swallowing the bag, goes on to another. In this way the whole downy brood are soon set free, and begin picking up small stones to prepare their gizzard or muscular second stomach for grinding, while their parents scrape the sand and find and break up food for them.
So the ostrich lives its life in Africa, from Algeria right down to Cape Colony; while its smaller and lighter-coloured relations, the Rheas, with their three-toed feet, course over the plains of Paraguay and Brazil, on the other side of the Atlantic, often swimming from island to island, in the bays or across the rivers, but quite unable to fly with their soft hair-like feathers, though their wings are larger than those of the ostrich. Then when we turn to the East we find other running birds; the Cassowary, with its three toes, its horny helmet, its five long single feathers, and its five naked pointed quills in the place of a wing, feeding on fruit and vegetables in New Guinea, or sharing the dreary scrubs of Australia with the almost wingless Emus wandering in pairs, the only constant married couples among the running birds.
Nor is New Zealand left without a representative of this family, for there we have the curious little Apteryx or Kiwi ([Fig. 36]), with its thick stumpy legs, its long beak, and its soft downy body, under which are hidden its aborted wings. Perhaps it is because he is small and insignificant that the apteryx has lived on till now, crouching under the bushes by day and creeping about in the twilight, thrusting his long nose-tipped beak into the damp ground to draw out the worms. For long ago, though in the memory of man, as we learn from the traditions of the Maories, other wingless birds called Moas,[97] which were six or seven feet high, lived in New Zealand, and had fierce fights with the natives. We find their bones now, often charred from having been cooked in the native ovens, and when they are put together they give us skeletons which show that these birds must have been as formidable as that great bird of Madagascar, the Æpyornis, whose gigantic bones and eggs, three times the size of ostrich eggs, have been found, though the bird itself has never been seen.
Fig. 36.