Emu chicks hatch at Scottish bird sanctuary

A bird sanctuary has overcome the challenge of the Scottish weather to breed what are believed to be the country's only baby emus.

Staff at Bird Gardens Scotland, a conservation charity in the Borders, are celebrating after their human intervention led to the first chick hatching on Saturday.

It's the culmination of a project that's taken more than seven years to complete.

The flightless birds are rare outside of their native Australia, where they are the largest indigenous bird.

Intriguingly, with emus it's the male that incubates the eggs, rather than the female.

Bird Gardens Scotland's male had suffered numerous set-backs in recent years due to the ‘Beast from the East’ in 2018, late frosts and storms.

Owen Joiner, founder and joint director of the sanctuary based in Oxton, Berwickshire, said that Scotland’s unpredictable weather seemed to ruin efforts.

He said: "Our male's had a lot of disappointments. The ‘Beast from the East’ delivered horrendous conditions and he didn’t manage to protect the eggs through.

"And we've had other storms, torrential showers and late frosts all caused havoc with his nests."

Mr Joiner says they "decided to collaborate with him, taking half of the eggs away and incubated them in our baby barn".

Whether the efforts would work wasn't certain.

The bird breeder added: "You can’t see inside emu eggs, the way you can with chicken eggs, with candling, so we just had to wait.

“Then a few days before hatching we began to hear them, and as they were cheeping and whistling we returned the eggs to his nest.

"His behaviour just changed immediately. He was just spot-on and hatched them."

Staff at the sanctuary are "delighted" with the results and are now watching with interest at how the emus work together to rear and teach the infants.

The trio are believed to be the only baby emus in Scotland, and add to the 600-plus birds and species at the sanctuary, including some that feature on priority lists as extremely rare or threatened species.

They also have kookaburras, flamingos, cranes, all sorts of parrots and even some mammals, including red-necked wallabies. They work with other sanctuaries and zoos all around the world.

But why did Owen, who hails from Caithness, and fellow director Mark Haillay, from Gloucestershire, bring emus to the Scottish Borders?

“Australian wildlife is weird and wacky, and very interesting,” says Owen.

“People like myself from the 70s and 80s will remember the emu from children’s programmes so there is a bit of nostalgia there for us.

“But the whole purpose of the Bird Garden is to bring people in contact with rare and threatened birds in particular.

"Emus are quite indicative of Australia’s challenges with conflicts in agriculture, with barbed wire fencing going up and the horrendous bush fires, which displaces them, so there are a lot of challenges for Australian wildlife.

“While they’re quite quirky we can also highlight their plight by having them here in a safe place in Scotland.”

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