OCR Text |
Show 218 BY PATH AND TRAIL. bring much in the market ; the first and second pluckings selling for a few shillings. A healthy ostrich will yield $ 30 worth of feathers every year for twenty- five years, though the average life of the bird is seventy- five years. Many hundreds of young birds roam over alfalfa fields enclosed with wire netting. Breeding pairs are confined in a two- acre enclosure. The range birds feed, like cat tle, on alfalfa grass, picking up quartz pebbles which are scattered over the fields for their use, and which, for them, serves the same end as gravel for hens and chick ens. When the hens are laying they are given, from time to time, a diet of bone dust to help in strengthening the egg shells. One of the most singular and inter esting habits of the ostrich is his daily exercise. Every morning at sunrise the herd, two by two, begin training for the day by indulging in a combination cake-walk and Virginia reel. Thenin single file they race around the pasture till they are thoroughly limbered up. When halting, they form in squares and begin to dance, intro ducing imitations of the waltz, negro break- downs, cake-walks and hornpipes. It is a laughable and grotesque performance, and, when the birds are in full plumage and their wings extended, not devoid of grace and beauty of action. The ostrich is the ornithological goat. He will eat and digest anything. Offer him a large San Diego orange, and he'll swallow it whole. Grease an old shoe with tamarind oil, throw it into the paddock where the birds feed, and at once there is a struggle for its possession, ending in the complete disappearance of the brogan in its entirety or in fragments. The salvation of the ostrich are its plumes. His feathers have saved him from the fate of extinct birds and animals like the great auk and the Siberian mammoth. He is destined to |