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There is a saying that the Mounties always get their man. But on one November night in Lunenburg County, N.S., their two-legged quarry wasn’t a man, it was a bird — a big bird.
Const. Nicholas Barz was one of the Lunenburg District RCMP officers dispatched to look for an emu wandering around a back road at night.
They located the runaway near Lunenburg but shepherding it to safety proved to be a task. Emus, which resemble and are related to ostriches, are flightless and are the second-largest living bird in the world.
“It wasn’t running all that fast or anything like that, it was just very skittish with me and just with going back to its pen in general,” Barz told CBC News in an interview on Thursday.
“It didn’t want to get too close and I’ll be honest, I didn’t want to get pecked in the hand or something like that so I was just trying to convince it to go without getting super close to it myself because I have no experience with emus or other large birds, for that matter.”
Barz said he is six feet two inches tall and estimated the emu was about two inches or so shorter.
“They’re pretty tall and they have pretty long claws and quite the beak on them so I was being pretty cautious. I didn’t want to have to fill out a hazardous occurrence report for that,” he said.
The officer said he tried herding the bird with his baton, but the emu had other ideas and took off into the woods.
Eventually, the Mounties and the bird’s owners were able to get it back to its pen.
“I still haven’t found out the correct way to wrangle an emu but maybe next time I’ll have more experience,” Barz said.
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