We all can picture an ostrich in our minds: big, long neck, goofy expression. It doesn’t fly. Right? Or is that the emu? In reality, those are pretty good descriptions of both. Despite their similarities – both are from the ratite “family” of birds – they have substantial differences. Ostriches hail from Africa (rather than Australia) and are bigger, faster, and stronger. They live longer than emus, have only two toes (instead of three), and are omnivores rather than herbivores. Most importantly for our story, people flocked to see the ostrich (not the emu) at St. Pete’s popular Ostrich Farm and Zoo.
Fashion and Feathers, Not Food
When you hear the word “farm,” it’s normal to think of food. In the late 19th century, however, ostrich farms gained popularity in the United States because of fashion. The demand for ostrich feathers as adornment for hats, dresses, and jackets began with royalty and soon spread to other social classes. By the end of the 19th century, fashionable women across the world desired ostrich plumes as fashion accessories. Demand soon outstripped the availability of feathers coming from wild-caught and killed African ostriches. In response, farmers in South Africa came up with a plan to domesticate ostriches and sell feathers plucked from live birds. With the help of a newly invented egg incubator, which kept the stressed ostriches from destroying or abandoning their eggs, ostrich farms began to spread in Africa as well as Europe. Even though fashion can be notoriously fickle, ostrich plumes stuck around until the simplified styles of the 1920s decreased demand. In the decades between the 1870s boom and that market dive, ostrich owners began to use inventive methods to supplement their incomes, including turning ostrich farms into tourist attractions.
An Ostrich Farm Finds a New Home
Florida entered this budding enterprise in the late 1890s with the Florida Ostrich Farm in Jacksonville. Its success inspired others; and in 1907, Jerry Wells set up shop in Tampa with a flock of birds he brought from France. Said by the local paper to be the fourth ostrich farm in the country, it joined Jacksonville as well as farms in Saratoga, New York, and Pasadena, California. According to the St. Petersburg Times, business was not what Wells had hoped. When he saw “the number of tourists in St. Petersburg,” he decided “at once” to relocate. Leasing a 20-acre tract “on the trolley line just west of Oak Park” in St. Pete, Wells opened the St. Petersburg Ostrich Farm and Zoo in 1908. For a 5-cent trolley ride and a 15-cent entry fee (10 cents for kids), visitors could stroll by enclosures holding ostriches, monkeys, peacocks, bantam chickens, squirrels, and an alligator named Queen. Billed as a “man eater,” Queen was a popular attraction. (Once, having tunneled a crafty escape, she targeted the nearby hen house, not the Wells family, so perhaps she should have been billed “chicken eater” instead.) Visitors could purchase ostrich eggs to eat and buy hand-painted eggshells as souvenirs. Sometimes, school kids got to do both. They’d eat a breakfast of scrambled ostrich egg, then paint their own eggshells. The farm also sold ostrich fans and ostrich feathers. The latter cost between 25 cents and $2.50 for a bunch and were “cut right from the bird.” For many visitors, the high point of the tour was the daily ostrich races.
Off to the Races
Ostriches are big. The average full-grown bird weighs between 250 and 300 pounds and stands 7 to 10 feet tall. Ostriches are fast. They can reach short-distance sprint speeds of about 45 miles per hour and can maintain a 35-mile-per-hour pace for long distances. If they feel cornered, threatened, or come face-to-face with a perceived predator, they tend to react aggressively. Despite their speed, they’re more likely to fight than they are to run, and their long, sharp claws can be lethal to humans. In addition, ostriches are not known to be trainable. They have relatively small brains as compared to their size, and their primal instinct to attack is strong. In order to get the bird to run around the track, the ostrich’s head was covered with a hood. Once the bird had been soothed, a rider mounted it and removed the hood. The ostrich took off and made its way erratically around the course. It was a sight not soon forgotten. Despite (or perhaps because of) the threat of danger, the spectacle of these “races” remained popular for decades, and ostrich farms sprang up in many tourist towns across the country. An early-morning fire on April 4, 1913, which left “only a few smoking embers, the kitchen stove, and bed frames,” signaled the end of the Ostrich Farm and Zoo in St. Pete. Not all was lost: The Times reported that Queen, the “famous man-eating alligator” survived and relocated to her new home at the corner of First Avenue N and Ninth Street, where she would be ready to exhibit her ferocity as soon as the weather warmed up. She was, after all, a Florida native.
