4 D Acres

Christmas always brings back memories of a day in the life of an Emu Farmer. It was an early, early Sunday morning, about a week before Christmas. Temperatures were in the mid 20’s as I woke at 2:00 am and headed into the other room to wake one of my sons. It was time to get dressed and ready to take a trip to North Central Kansas where we would be picking up some birds from a farmer who had decided that he was ready to retire from emu farming.

After meeting another emu farm couple who would also be getting some birds, picking up my other son, and stopping to have breakfast, we pulled into our destination about an hour after sunrise. Maneuvered into is more accurate as the roads were heavily rutted and the farm road was tight for 2 trucks and trailers.

After the sun rose, the air and ground temperatures started to rise quickly into the upper 40’s, so the once frozen ground now became a mud pit. After slipping on a fence panel buried in the mud, I fell and twisted my knee, while a fugitive emu escaped from the trailer back into the pen, using me as a launch pad.  We slipped and slid as we corralled and wrangled the rest of the emu into the two trailers. While this would have been a YouTube video sure to go viral, no cameras were present to capture the chaos.

While we should have been done by 9:00 am, by 11:00 we had loaded all the emu and were headed out the way we came in, but the roads had gone from frozen ruts to a slimy, muddy slip-n-slide. We were glad that we had 4 x 4’s or we certainly wouldn’t have made it off the country roads. We were now well on our way to the processing plant in Central Kansas, and little did we know that we were in for more fun.

Emu are funny birds. As hard as they are to load onto a trailer, they often don’t want to get off once safely aboard. (Never mind the one that mistook me for a diving board.) While unloading all but two pairs of breeders into pens, one emu decided after he was off the trailer, that he would march right back up the ramp to the trailer again.

We finally finished at 2:00 pm, and famished, headed to a burger joint for a well deserved meal. We said goodbye to my youngest son, and the eldest and I headed back to 4 D Acres, completing our 450 mile round trip, only to arrive after dark. Because earlier attempts to unload the birds in the dark had failed, we decided to leave them safely on the trailer until morning.

My wife, waking early at 4 am to handle some of the feeding and farm chores, saw that it was beginning to rain. Knowing that my son and I were still sleeping off our long day, she decided to see if she could unload one of the breeder pairs by herself. Because each pair was in a separate compartment, it seemed that unloading just two at a time might be easier. As it was still dark, she had a flashlight with her, and when she shined it into the trailer to check on the birds, they started to follow the beam of light, right off the trailer. Might as well try it with the second pair as well. They seemingly unloaded themselves, mesmerized by the light. After my son and I heard the story of her super powers, we had to give her a good-natured ribbing, asking her where she was when we were loading the birds. We might just have to call her the Emu Whisperer.