Birdbrain Ostrich Ranch

The second farm we visited on our farm tour was Birdbrain Ostrich Ranch. They raise ostriches for meat and eggs. An ostrich egg is equivalent to about 36 chicken eggs! If you want a hard boiled ostrich egg, cook it for an hour and a half. Then you have to cut the shell off with a knife.












The ostrich babies were so cute! These guys are about 3 weeks old.











They were as interested in us as we were in them.








Ostriches grow really fast. At three months of age, they were as tall as we were!









It takes about 12 to 14 months to get an ostrich big enough to "harvest" (we tried not to think about that too much). By that age, they are quite tall and strong.







They had several breeding pairs which can produce between 20 and 40 eggs per year. They told us that they make nests out in the open and the male ostriches are in charge of the egg (and the young once they are hatched in the wild. At the farm, they separate the eggs for incubation and raise all the young in a group.) They have to watch where they walk when they are in the pastures with the breeding pairs, because they do not like you walking through their nests!

The biggest male they have is a "red necked" (I am not making this up!) They have 3 breeds, or subspecies of ostrich on the Ranch, the red necked, the blue necked, and the African black.
Their red male is 10 1/2 feet tall.





We really enjoyed visiting this farm. The owners were so nice and friendly and very proud of their birds.


And how cool is it, anyway, to see so many ostriches up close? They were a lot bigger than I expected, and there were cool details you might not notice otherwise, like their peculiar two-toed feet. Don't they look like they should be attached to a dinosaur?


A final visit with the baby ostriches was captured on camera, not only by me but also by Davidson News. Scroll down to the photo gallery and click on the first photo in the upper left hand corner. Do those folks look familiar?









See you later ostriches!