Ostrich Facts

The ostrich cannot fly, and the reason is structural: like other ratites (emus, cassowaries, rheas, kiwis) it lacks the keel on the breastbone that anchors flight muscles. Everything instead serves running. Its long, heavily muscled legs are bare of feathers, which also helps shed heat, and — uniquely among birds — each foot has just two toes (didactyly), the big inner toe tipped with a hoof-like claw while the outer acts as an outrigger, cutting ground contact for speed. Its eyes, over two inches across and bigger than its brain, give sharp, wide vision to catch predators miles off across open plain. Having no teeth, it swallows stones (gastroliths) that grind food in a muscular gizzard. Males stand 7 to 9 feet and up to 320 pounds in black-and-white plumage; females are smaller and camouflage-brown.

Once ranging across Africa and the Middle East, wild ostriches are now confined to Africa, mainly sub-Saharan, with major populations in Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Ethiopia, and Sudan. They specialise in open, arid country — savanna, dry grassland, scrub, and even true desert like the Namib and Kalahari — and avoid dense forest and thick brush, which would rob them of their two great defences: seeing danger early and outrunning it. They are drought-hardy, drawing much of their water from the plants they eat.

The ostrich is an opportunistic omnivore whose diet is mostly plant matter — dry grasses, seeds, shrubs, roots, and succulent leaves and flowers, reached with its long, flexible neck. An acidic gut and very long intestines (up to about 46 feet) let it ferment tough, low-quality forage that defeats many mammal grazers. When the chance arises it readily snaps up animal protein too — locusts, beetles, small lizards, snakes, and the occasional rodent.

Ostriches are social and nomadic, forming flocks of 10 to 50 (sometimes over 100 where food is rich) that pool many pairs of eyes against predators, under a dominant male and a primary female. Their main defence is speed: an ostrich can sprint over 40 mph and hold 30 mph for miles to exhaust a lion or hyena. Cornered, or defending a nest, it kicks forward, and the big claw can seriously injure a predator or a person — a reason to keep well back. And no, ostriches do not bury their heads in the sand; the myth comes from their habit of lying flat and stretching the neck along the ground to blend in when danger nears.

Breeding centres on a communal nest. The dominant male scrapes a shallow depression and performs a courtship dance — dropping to his knees and rolling his head while flashing his black-and-white wings. The primary female lays first, in the centre, and several minor females add their eggs to the same scrape, so one nest may hold 15 to 60 eggs, each over three pounds (about 24 chicken eggs) and strong enough to bear an adult human's weight. Incubation is shared for camouflage: the brown female sits by day, the black male by night. Chicks hatch in about 42 days, already the size of a chicken and able to run with their fiercely protective parents. Wild ostriches live 30 to 40 years.

The common ostrich is Least Concern, with a huge range and large global population — but wild numbers are in steady long-term decline. Farmland expansion fragments its open habitat, and the vast livestock fences strung across the plains cut the nomadic routes it depends on, sometimes causing die-offs or fatal entanglement. Commercial ostrich farming is a large industry, but wild birds are still poached for meat and their eggs harvested for food and shell containers. Conservation leans on large, unfenced parks and cross-border reserves that give these giants room to roam.

• IUCN Red List of Threatened Species: Struthio camelus
• San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance: Ostrich
• National Geographic: Ostrich
• African Wildlife Foundation: Ostrich