The Emu Lied to Me. It's Not an Ostrich

10/4/2015

Ostrich, left, has two toes. Emu, center, has three toes. Bird on our deck has three toes. That's really all I know.

The statue swore to me that it was an ostrich, but Brian Savin wondered if it was an emu.
I looked it up. Emus have three toes and ostriches have two toes. (Ostriches are also bigger. Who knew?)

http://www.differencebetween.net/science/nature/difference-between-emu-and-ostrich/

The bird my wife found at Home Goods has three toes.

Both birds' meat is red rather than white. At first, I thought maybe the emu was claiming it was an ostrich to avoid being eaten, but apparently both are eaten.
Either way, the bird on our back deck took a fearsome barrage of acorns in recent days.
We will take it inside for the winter, along with the stork and the penguin, also from Home Goods.

Brian Savin

10/4/2015 11:35:37 am

I turned on the tube this morning and found my only TV program, Sunday Morning, was displaced by the Jets in London. I like the Jets, but in the afternoon. They've got two big birds themselves in wide receivers Brandon Marshall and Eric Decker, with about the same characteristic differences as the ostrich and emu. One a bit bigger and runs a run faster, the other has the extra toe for mobility and quick slot turns. I think I'll nickname them Grief and Glory. Marshall (the ostrich) does all the hard work getting the team down field. He's Grief. With Marshall triple teamed in the end zone, Decker (the emu) get's to score the touchdowns weaving through crowds in the end zone.. He's Glory.

By the way, the Millbrook School, in Millerton, NY, is the only secondary school in the country to have its own zoo, and it's great. In addition to a lemur house (best visited around Halloween given their screams) they have a large number of emu. No ostrich.

Brian Savin

10/4/2015 11:38:51 am

Sorry, the zoo is in Millbrook. I got distracted watching another Jet's touchdown and mistyped.

George Vecsey

10/4/2015 05:16:01 pm

Brian, thanks. Wait, it's football season? GV

Josh Rubin

10/5/2015 09:57:46 am

Who does the emu like in the divisional series? And who would he(?) have pitch game 4?

Comments are closed.

QUOTES
"Among the things that have long fascinated people about Jesus and explain his enduring appeal is his method of dialogue and teaching. "He asked a lot of questions and told a lot of stories in the form of parables. In fact, parables form about a third of Jesus’ recorded teachings. The Gospels were written decades after he died, so his questions and parables clearly left a deep impression on those who bore testimony to him....
"Some of Jesus’ questions were rhetorical; others were meant to challenge or even provoke. In some cases, Jesus used questions to parry attacks by religious authorities who set traps for him. In others, he used questions to enter more fully into the lives of others and to help people look at the state of their hearts. He asked people about their fears and their faith. Jesus used questions to free a woman caught in adultery from condemnation and to inquire whether people considered him to be the Messiah. He probed deeply into questions not many had asked before him, like “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
---(Peter Wehner, long-time White House consultant and writer, in the NYT last week about Jesus Christ’s method of teaching by asking questions.)

"Would that I could mention all the illuminating details in this biography, for example, why Wells praised Black Americans so highly, saying, 'I took a mighty liking to these gentle, human, dark-skinned people,' and 'Whatever America has to show in heroic living today, I doubt if she can show anything finer than the quality of the resolve, the steadfast efforts hundreds of black and colored men are making today to live blamelessly, honorably and patiently, getting by themselves what scraps of refinement, beauty and learning they may, keeping their hold on a civilization they are grudged and denied.''
-- "How H.G. Wells Predicted the 20th Century," Charles Johnson, NYT Book Review, Nov. 19, 2021. ***".

...the monsters arrive."
"They come in a deafening, surging swarm, blasting from lawn to lawn and filling the air with the stench of gasoline and death. I would call them mechanical locusts, descending upon every patch of gold in the neighborhood the way the grasshoppers of old would arrive, in numbers so great they darkened the sky, to lay bare a cornfield in minutes. But that comparison is unfair to locusts.
"Grasshoppers belong here. Gasoline-powered leaf blowers are invaders, the most maddening of all the maddening, environment-destroying tools of the American lawn-care industry."

---The great Margaret Renkl, from Nashville, one of my favorite NYT bylines, Oct. 26, 2021.
(She describes our Long Island enclave to every decibel, every stink.)
lwww.nytimes.com/2021/10/25/opinion/leaf-blowers-california-emissions.html
---

The Emu Lied to Me. It's Not an Ostrich

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