An Ostrich and a Hot Potato.

Evening Post, Volume LIV, Issue 152, 24 December 1897, Page 7 (Supplement)

An Ostrich and a Hot Potato.

For odd appetites the goat and the ostrich stand supreme, with the ostrich just a step ahead. And yet an ostrich finds trouble in swallowing a hot potato. A South African writer tells an amusing story of greed and how it was punished. He says : — These ostriches were a source of endless trouble to us. They grew rapidly and developed great kicking powers, until they became sometimes positively dangerous, the dogs and the Kaffirs coming in for most of their attentions. Their appetite was insatiable. We used to make large quantities of biltong, or sun-dried meat, and there were usually dozens of strips of it hanging on rheime slung- from wagon to wagon, and these were always objects of attention on the part of the ostriches. It was most amusing 1 to see one trying to swallow a strip a yard long and two inches thick, just as a chicken struggles with a worm that is a little too big for it. Once we had to drag j a huge strip out of one of the bird's throats to save it from choking. But it was the culinary department that interested them most. They would always attack the Kaffirs bringing the viands from the ' kitchen ' to the tent, and sometimes were so pertinaoious that the boy would get frightened and throw the dish away and bolt, andi we would lose the best part of our dinner. They would even come into the tent and snatch, things off the table, and we would take it out of them by smothering a dainty morsel with salt and cayenne pepper; but after a while they seemed to flourish on it. One day, however, we got the laugh on our side. Dinner was preparing, and one of the birds was investigating the pots around the fire. A great pot of huge potatoes took his fancy, and he incontinently seized and swallowed a red-hot tuber as big as a large pomegranate. He danced, he jumped, he kicked, he twisted his neck about almost into knots, he flapped his wings and waggled his tail, he ran amuck, knocking things down and banging himself up against the wagons and stone walls, and at last tore away into the veldt at twenty miles an hour until he was out of sight, and did not appear again for another oouple of hours. Every morning soon after sunrise these birds would indulge in a dance. They -would rush away into the veldt for about a mile, and then suddenly stop and commence waltzing round and round in the most ridiculous fashion, often till they dropped. I never could understand the meaning of this performance. It might be mere gamboling, but, if so, it must be nearly the only case of young birds playing, as so many young animals do.