"The Ostrich (Struthio camelus) is the largest bird on earth and, at seventy kilometres per hour sustained, the fastest runner among them. Its eye — five centimetres in diameter — is the largest of any land vertebrate, and exceeds in size the brain it serves; a fact which tells you something about the priorities this animal established early and has not revised. The kick is forward-only, sufficient to split a plank, and is not offered casually. The head-in-sand behaviour — perhaps the most universally recognised of any bird's characteristics — has been observed and confirmed by the author in the field. The female incubates during the day, her brown plumage providing camouflage; the arrangement is systematic and, in the author's view, reflects well on both parties."
It began following him at the drainage line.
The Colonel had been walking his morning survey circuit — the waterhole, the drainage line, the open ground to the south, the return via the fever trees — when he became aware, at the point where the path narrowed between two thorn thickets, that something was behind him. He turned. The ostrich was there, perhaps fifteen feet back, regarding him with one of its extraordinary eyes. It was a female — brown, tall, unhurried. She had the expression of an animal that has made a decision it cannot currently explain.
He turned back and continued. She continued. He slowed. She slowed. He stopped to make a note and she stopped, with the patient air of something that has nowhere else to be and is prepared to wait for as long as the note requires.
He wrote: Ostrich following. Reason: unclear. Not aggressive. Not territorial. Simply present.
He continued. She continued.
This went on for forty minutes.
At the open ground the Colonel paused to observe a male completing his morning territorial display — the wings lowered and swept, the neck curling in its particular S-shape, the deep boom that the throat sac produced with the conviction of something that considers this the most important sound in the available morning. The Colonel watched this with genuine attention. It was, he noted, a complete performance — nothing held back, every anatomical resource committed. He wrote: Mating display. Wings, neck, vocalisation. Full deployment. Reminds the author of certain regimental dinners.
He looked at this. Left it in.
The female behind him observed the displaying male with apparent indifference and then looked away, which the Colonel found either discriminating or simply representative of her broader attitude to the morning's events.
The nest was in the shallow scrape at the open ground's edge — a depression perhaps a metre across, containing what the Colonel initially estimated as twenty eggs and subsequently revised upward to something he wrote simply as considerable. The eggs were large, pale, evenly spaced, and being sat on by a large dark-plumaged male who regarded the Colonel's approach with the focused displeasure of a professional being interrupted mid-task.
The Colonel stopped. He looked at his field notes, where he had written female incubates during the day. He looked at the male on the nest. He looked at the male's plumage — dark, near-black, exactly the plumage the night would require for a bird sitting still in darkness.
He crossed out female incubates during the day.
He wrote: Male incubates. Night. Dark plumage provides camouflage in darkness. Female: brown, for day. Observed directly. Previous note: incorrect.
The male hissed.