Ratite from down under

Usage examples of emu.

Anoshi and Bap were dressed in the undersuiting that went with their spacesuits, including even biomedical sensors and the semi-bulky EMU urine collection systems about their crotches and waists.

Nevertheless, they saw, though unable to get near them, a couple of those large birds peculiar to Australia, a sort of cassowary, called emu, five feet in height, and with brown plumage, which belong to the tribe of waders.

She was a genyornis, a giant flightless bird twice the size of an emu.

By the window, the articulated skeleton of an emu posed amid the frondage, one leg raised.

Not Emu, or Goanna Lizard, or Kangaroo, not a Rainbow Serpent nor a Sky-God nor any of the Ancestors who were here in the Dreamtime.

I thank you: Blaxland did everything that was kind and hospitable - he desires his best compliments, by the way - and we saw the emu, various kinds of kangaroo, the echidna - good Lord, the echidnal - the small fat grey animal that sleeps high up in gum-trees and that very absurdly claims to be a bear, a great many of the parrot tribe, a nameless monitory lizard, all that we had hoped to see and more, except for the platypus.

Jack, To whaur the emus bide, Ye shall find the auld hen on the nest, While the auld cock sits beside.

I took it outside and tramped around behind our fence until I was satisfied there were no emus lurking about.

By 1993, flocks of emus and ostriches ranging from a half dozen to several hundred birds were roaming through the hills destroying property and occasionally slicing or trampling people and livestock to death.

Still more deaths resulted as many of the bullets and shotgun blasts intended for the tiny heads of emus instead hit the people being attacked.

Australians learned the same lesson in 1932, when troops armed with machine guns and artillery attempted to destroy a flock of twenty thousand emus that was devouring Western Australian crops.

The campaign failed, however, when the besieged emus split their army into squads and adopted guerrilla tactics.

The weapons had initially been designed for use against emus only, but then a representative from Dripping Springs rose to point out that ostriches, while fewer in number, had also caused plenty of trouble.

Camels, he insisted, were far more hostile to man than either emus or ostriches --and if the so-called emu pistols did not include a setting for camels, he would block the appropriation for their manufacture.

We stood like emus, listening to him all through one verse, then we pulled ourselves together.