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Published: September 18th 2023
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We awoke to frost on the ground, though the day warmed rapidly as the sun rose in a cloudless sky. We took a walk down the dirt road outside the farm, spotting birds and flowering plants – well, observing rather than identifying them as we have no idea what anything is called! The farm lies on a plain surrounded by the Swartberg mountains, which looked beautiful in the early morning sun
We were passed by two English, leathered-up motorcycle tourists who had stayed overnight in the farm, on their way to who knows where. The farm itself grows alfalfa and lucerne which is turned into animal feed.
We had booked to visit one of the ostrich farms nearby but the map we had been given was clearly wrong. It wasn't far but we were a bit stuck so turned into the yard of a farm. A massive Boer with his head under the bonnet of a VW waved his arm rather grumpily at Sara to indicate it was “down the road”. As we left some very shady looking characters towing a number of wrecked cars pulled in and stared at us. Time to depart smartly…
We found the
farm, where we were loaded into a covered trailer with seats to be towed by a tractor. Our fellow passengers were an English and an Afrikaaner couple and eight or so very jolly and noisy African ladies who had all bought tubs of feed to feed the ostriches. There are different types of Ostrich – SA, Kenya, Zimbabwe etc – which are different sizes and with some colour variations. They have separate fenced areas. They do all have in common an urge to run over to the trailers to be fed by the tourists. They greedily thrust their necks and faces into the feeding buckets, scoffing at a frenzied pace, to the alarm of the African ladies who felt they were n danger of being pecked as the birds vied with each other to get their heads into the tubs of food. . The guide explained they are extremely stupid with a brain the size and shape of a walnut. They forget anything that happened more than five minutes before, so they eat frantically as they have no recollection that their keepers will feed them at regular times during the day. As far as they know every meal will be
the only one they will ever get. For the same reason they form no bonds with any human they come into contact with.
They are not monogamous and a group of females will all lay their eggs together. One of them will then sit on them to incubate them. There may be ten eggs in a nest (literally a shallow depression in the dust). The keeper will come and take away half the eggs to incubate them in incubators, and the ostriches then lay more eggs to keep the nest up to size. So they production of eggs is maintained with little effort.
The ostriches are reared for their meat , their skin which is used for making handbags etc and their feathers. There were also some emus on the farm which are related, smaller, and can be quite vicious. They are ugly too.
Oudsthoorn was at one point the ostrich capital of the world, with over 750,000 ostriches in the early 1900s, and there are still ‘ostrich palaces’ built by the then very wealthy ostrich farmers. The numbers are down to under 200,000 now. We enjoyed ostrich fillet on our first night at the de Zeekoe
farm which was excellent and rather like venison, and had ostrich bobotie the second night.
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