The Emu Invasion

We have a pair of Emu chicks.  Actually, Logan has a pair of emu chicks in the house. Well, after that sentence I'm not really sure what else I should write about them.

I guess a bit of an explanation might be in order. The year after we moved here from Guatemala, in September of 2004 we took the boys to the Tennessee Valley Fair for the first time. Logan was seven years old. Of all of the animal exhibits there his very favorite thing was the petting zoo. They had a tame emu. Logan had never seen anything like it before, it was a giant 5 foot tall bird that looked like a dinosaur. He was smitten! All he talked about after that trip to the fair was that someday he wanted an emu. Every year we would go back to the fair and Logan would head straight for the petting zoo, and the emu.

 Any time we talked about getting a farm, or a pet or animals in general over the next 9 years Logan was sure to bring up emus. He wanted one, and he wasn't going to let us forget it! When we sold our house last summer and started looking for a small farm, Logan mentioned that he hoped it would have room for an emu. Rodrigo and I hadn't seen any emu chicks for sale in years so we nodded our heads and said, "Sure son." Haha, little did I know...

On Sunday afternoon Rodrigo and Logan were looking at the farm and garden section of Craigslist trying to find me a livestock guardian dog to take care of my goats and chickens. We've spotted coyotes in the fields across the road (in broad daylight ) and hawks are constantly flying over head scoping out the rabbit arks in the yard, hoping for an escapee. So I really need a good dog to help out around here! Well, they didn't find me a dog, instead they spotted an ad for emu chicks. And that, as they say, was that. The phone number was called and the directions given, and within a couple of hours Logan became the very happy almost 16 year old owner/ caregiver to a pair of adorable emu chicks.

For the moment they are living in a old baby play-yard converted to emu brooder in our dining room. The lady we got them from says that within two weeks they should be over two feet tall, so other arrangements will have to be made as soon as possible.

Honestly, this is just exactly the kind of thing that I would have begged my parents to let me do when I was a kid. They probably wouldn't have let me, they were pretty strict about the no weird livestock or pets. In retrospect they did let me have a pretty wide range of "normal" pets when I was a kid, but you know, I always had aspirations of starting my own zoo. Gerald Durrell was my hero, he traveled the world collecting animals and started a zoo! I read all of his books cover to cover so many times they became quite ragged and tattered after years of being carted around the globe with me. I always thought that when I grew up and had kids of my own and they wanted something that really and truly interested them, and we were in a place where we would be able to provide it with the type of home it needed, and it wasn't going to pose a threat to any little ones, or require a fortune to buy or for it's upkeep that we would let them have it. So here we are now with Logan's emu chicks in the house...