Ostriches swim!

(File photo/Wikipedia/Melbourne Zoo) ::

April Holladay
HappyNews Columnist
Updated: 4/26/2007

Q: Can ostriches swim?
Lisa, Ridley Township, Pennsylvania

A: An ostrich, his black wings flailing for balance, sought the scant shelter of trapped debris against a fence as Hurricane Katrina's winds lessened in southeastern Louisiana. Water lapped against the fence, rising twelve feet in thirty minutes.

At first, the ostrich ran against the moving current but even his nine-foot height proved short. Two toes on one foot flicked the inundated ground, the other foot found only water. The ostrich floated, low in the water, his 250-pound (115-kg) mass buoyed by light, hollow, bird bones.

Kicking off the submerged fence, he stretched his neck forward, and slowly swam toward higher ground. He passed two men in a trawler, also paddling toward safety.

One man with poor eyesight peered at the apparition. "It looks like the Loch Ness Monster!"

"It's an ostrich," Meyers, his buddy, said.

Can ostriches swim? In August 2005, George Lee and his roommate, Michael Meyers, saw one swim by as they paddled toward the highway near the small town of Poydras, southeast of New Orleans, according to an account published in the Galveston County Daily News. I retold the story, with a little poetic license.

Rheas (another large flightless bird related to the ostrich) swim routinely. "When swimming, very little of their bodies appear above water; their necks are extended a little forward, and their progress is slow," Charles Darwin wrote in The Voyage of the Beagle. He also mentions, "On two occasions I saw some ostriches [he meant rheas] swimming across the Santa Cruz River [near the south tip of Argentina], where its course was about four hundred yards wide, and the stream rapid."

I asked ostrich ranchers and zookeepers for help answering this question. Answers flooded back; the consensus is ostriches can swim. The cincher came from Sharon Dewar and bird curator Michael Mace of the San Diego Zoo. Mace found a South African Dispatch Online article that reports wild ostriches swimming in the sea.

Almost at the tip of South Africa, near Cape Town, a fisherman saw two female ostriches on tiny Schaapen Island, and alerted park staff at a nearby bird sanctuary on the mainland. A day later, the two birds waded back into the sea, and fought their way across strong cross currents for twenty minutes to the mainland. Park staff monitored their progress in a patrol boat.

Apparently, ostriches swim by "using the same motion pattern of the legs as they do when running, however, not very efficiently," conjectures biologist Christoffer Johansson, [http://www.teorekol.lu.se/staff/cjohansson/cjohansson.html] a professor at the Lunds University in Sweden who studies the hydrodynamics of swimming birds. Johansson says if they're buoyant enough to keep their heads above water, "swimming is not very difficult."

Ostrich farmers provided more evidence. Here are a few of the many helpful replies:

"They can swim across a pond," says Rooster Cogburn of the Rooster Cogburn Ostrich Ranch in Arizona.

"Yes they can [swim]; on hot days they love going into water to cool down," says Dougie Bester of Cango Ostrich Farm, nine miles (14 km) outside of Oudtshoorn in South Africa.

During excessive rains, a farmer said ostrich pens on her farm filled with water, and the ostriches swam, "like swans", across a pond to dry ground." emails Dianna Westmoreland of the American Ostrich Association.

Donna Dernbach of Golden Dreams Ranch in Wisconsin emailed about a friend's ostriches, "They go into the water and swim to the other side [of a pond]. All the farmer could see was their necks and heads."