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Show 216 BY PATH AND TBAIL. months- old chick is always hungry, he is pecking and eating every moment he is awake, and will devour more food than a grown bird. They grow fast, gaining a foot a month in height for six or seven months. Some of the birds on the Salt river farms are eight and nine feet from the head to the ground, and weigh from 400 to 500 pounds. Some one has said that facts are some times stranger than fiction, and in the wonderful provis ion made by nature for the perpetuation of the ostrich, the saying becomes an aphorism. The first three eggs laid by this singular bird are sterile and will not hatch. By a wonderful law of instinct, or call it what we will, the mother lays these eggs outside the nest. There is a deep and mysterious law of nature compelling the bird to follow this command of instinct. On the African des erts, when the nesting time draws near, the birds retire into the most lonely and unfrequented parts of the soli tary and desolate region, far away from the haunts of beast and man, and from water. Now when the little creature, the chicken, is liberated from its prison by the bursting of its walls, it is very thirsty and craves for water or anything to slake its thirst. But there is no water. The mother looks upon its gasping offspring with its tiny tongue protruding, carries it over to where a sterile egg is lying in the sand, breaks the shell, and at once the little perishing creature buries its head in the opened egg, sucks in the liquid refreshment and lives. The next day the little thing staggers by itself to the wonderful fountain of the desert, and the day after it is able to walk straight upright to the well. On the ostrich farms or alfalfa ranges of Arizona, the young birds are taken away and raised by hand,, the barren eggs gathered by the keeper and sold for $ 1.00 |