Hopwood family says it saw emu in back yard
About a month and a half ago, Marla Siebart’s daughter told her an emu was in the back yard of their Hopwood home, and Siebart wasn’t quite sure the girl was serious. Then on Sunday afternoon, with the family’s dog barking in the background, Siebart heard her daughter, Meghan Simpson, screaming that the bird had returned.
“It was just walking around our back yard,” Siebart said, laughing at the thought.
A short time later, it left.
“It just walked right into the woods, like it knew where it was going,” she said.
Simpson grabbed a video camera to catch the bird on tape because her first encounter with the flightless bird left a few non-believers, Siebart said.
The Siebarts live at the base of the mountain in Old Oaks, off Woodstock Street, she said, and no one around has emus. She said she’s fairly sure it’s an emu, because, as a postal worker, she delivers mail in Carmichaels, where there is an emu farm, so she’s familiar with how they look.
Siebart said she called the state Game Commission, and officials said they could not do anything about the animal. She planned on contacting a local animal shelter to see if they could help with the problem.
Robin Moore of Noah’s Ark Animal Shelter said the area of the Siebarts’ home is residential, and not the type of place she’d expect to find an emu.
Moore said emus are fast birds, “and if they did not want to be captured, they would not be.”
She said someone familiar with the bird, or an owner, could catch the bird, but if the emu found itself cornered and did not want to be caught, Moore said it could attack. They graze, much like cows, Moore said.
In the meantime, Moore said the best advice is to avoid the animal. Siebart said she is hopeful that someone will read about the bird and claim it, but in the meantime, she said the 5-foot-tall bird seems well.
“It looked healthy, so it must be eating something,” she said.
With winter coming, Siebart said, she is concerned for the emu’s well-being, and wants to make sure that it’s taken care of in the cold months. “Somebody has to know who it belongs to. You’d know if you’re missing an emu,” she said.
The Scattered Oaks Emu Farm in Texas hosts a Web site about the birds. The site indicates that at birth, the emu is 6 to 8 inches tall, and can grow to 5 or 6 feet tall and weigh 110 to 150 pounds. They live for about 35 years.
The site said emus are “curious, generally docile, (and) occasionally fight among themselves during breeding seasons.”