My wife and I have two pet emus who live in our backyard. When we got our first emu1 (Guringai2), I expected that he would not be intelligent. I was taught in school that the ratio of brain size to body size was a good way to estimate intelligence in an animal. My that measure an emu should be one of the dumbest creatures on the planet.
Boy was that estimate WRONG! Emus are as smart as dogs. I first realized this when I distracted my wife who had just filled the wading pool for the emu's bath (Guringai loved getting a bath). Normally my wife would fill the pool than tap the surface of the water to call the emu for his bath. The emu would det in the the pool and my wife would roll him around in the water. When my wife failed to call the emu after filling the pool, the emu walked over to the pool and, instead of getting in, started tapping on the water with his beak. This got my wife's attention, she came over to the pool and things than proceeded as normal. I was amazed. The emu's action was like a dog bringing his leash to his person. The dog does not want the leash, he wants the walk that come after the leash. An emu is capable of the same level of reasoning.
Emu are large flightless avian dinosaurs.
Emus are related to the Dromornithids, a group of dinosaurs that lived during the same time as emus. Some scientists even consider emus to be
"living dinosaurs" because of their similar features to their dinosaur relatives.
Our emus love to be petted. The female emu (Crystal) will happily lie down to be petted. Our emus also like to cuddle.
Emu feathers are double shafted (two feathers grow out of a single shaft). Our emus seem to shed feather and grow new ones all year long.
As a result, our backyard is always littered with emu feathers.
Dinosaur feathers have been found preserved in amber as well a fossil imprints.
The specimens in amber have been dated to be about 100 million years old.
Emu feet are very similar to dinosaur feet. When you watch an emu move, you are probably seeing what a dinosaur looked like moving.
Based on the preserved dinosaur foot prints found in Connecticut (and many other places), dinosours had feet very like emus.
Emus are one of the gentler members of the ratites. A slightly smaller, closely related ratite is the cassowaries and they considered to be the
world's most dangerous bird. By contrast, there are no recorded cases of emus ever
intentionally3 killing a human.
Emus lay their eggs in the winter months. The shell is deep green in color, and resembles a giant avocado in appearance. An emu egg weighs, on average, about 1.5lbs, and has the same
volume as a dozen large chicken eggs.
[1] A person who raised emus who lives on our street had a baby emu born out of season. He did not want to take the time to raise a single chick and he knew that Amy (my wife) loved emus. He gave her the little stripped chick. The chick was so small that he came home in an airline under-seat cat carrier.
[2] When we got our first emu we asked a friend from Australia what was the Astralian aborigine word for "emu". He told us that the word was "Guringai" so that is what we named our emu. While researching this page I discovered that Guringai" is the name of on of the tribes of indigenous Australian people not their word for "emu".
[3] Some people have died when their car ran into an emu, but you can hardly blame the emu for that.