Edgar Williams - Ostrich

Edgar Williams

REAKTION BOOKS

For Karen and Laura

Published by
REAKTION BOOKS LTD
33 Great Sutton Street
London EC1V 0DX, UK
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 2013
Copyright Edgar Williams 2013

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publishers.

Page references in the Photo Acknowledgements and
Index match the printed edition of this book.

Printed and bound in China by C&C Offset Printing Co., Ltd

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Williams, Edgar Mark, 1960

Ostrich. (Animal)

1. Ostriches. 2. Ostrich products industry History.

I. Title II. Series

598.524DC23

eISBN: 9781780230665

The ostrich is a bird everyone recognizes easily; not because it is brightly coloured, like the peacock or parrot, nor because it looks intelligent, like the owl, but rather for its sheer size and ungainly appearance. The ostrich is a unique bird; its large size excludes it from flying and it is strictly terra firma-bound. At nearly 3 metres tall and weighing up to 150 kg, it cannot climb trees to escape predators, so has undergone a series of remarkable adaptations that allow it to live and thrive in the open arid regions of Africa. Without the need to keep its mass low for flying, it has evolved long muscular legs. If danger approaches, it does not need to fly away: it can outrun its predators instead and delivers a lethal kick if cornered. Another consequence of losing the ability to fly is that the feathers of the ostrich only serve to protect it from the heat of the fierce midday sun. These unique and peculiarly fluffy feathers have attracted mans attention from early times. They were made into fans to cool the Pharaohs brow in ancient Egypt and have provided a jaunty adornment to many a cap and cape. The continued demand for these feathers almost caused the extinction of the ostrich but in the end provided their ultimate protection. Like many other flightless birds such as the dodo, great auk and moa the ostrich could have been exterminated.

The ostrich belongs to an ancient group of flightless birds known as ratites, which dates back 80 million years, and which are now found mainly in the southern hemisphere. They include the Australian emu, the South American rhea and the New Zealand kiwi. Although the ostrich is the largest of the present-day ratites, its recently extinct cousins were even larger. These flightless giant birds managed to colonize the isolated land masses of the southern continents. Just how they achieved this has intrigued ornithologists for centuries and is a puzzle that was solved only recently.

A group of ostrich from the Okavengo Delta, Botswana.

Since our early origins were in Africa, mankind has always existed alongside the ostrich. Some of the earliest artwork in existence has been found in South Africa, scratched on 60,000-year-old fragments of ostrich eggshell. The early cradle of civilization that stretched across Arabia, North Africa and later southern Europe was also the natural range of the ostrich, ensuring its inclusion in the historical records, both written and illustrated.

An emu with her chicks, a close relative from Australia.

The meteoric demand for ostrich feathers in the fashion industry of the mid-nineteenth century led to a significant economic boom worldwide. History shows us that bust always follows boom and the changing world in the early twentieth century conspired to make ostrich and their feathers valueless. Many who had made their fortunes now lost them. Phoenix-like, the ostrich rose again as an economic force in the 1970s as the market for ostrich products leather, meat and feathers revived.

The ostrichs physical, metaphorical and metaphysical presence fills our written and collective memory. It is a bird known worldwide. Extracted from the arid peripheries of the African deserts, it is both mocked and celebrated, and transformed into abstract form in fine art and fiction. The ostrich, its feathers and its eggs are used as metaphors for justice and renewal; it can represent the chivalrous ideal or the ultimate in indecision.

The cassowary leads a solitary lifestyle in the jungles of Papua New Guinea and Northern Australia.