How’d an ostrich egg land in the U.P.?

By JOHN PEPIN, Journal Munising Bureau

MUNISING — Mary Irish recently received the strangest birthday gift she ever could have imagined.

“Mother Nature gave me a birthday egg,” Irish said.

On May 7, Mary and her husband Elmer were driving along Old Indian Town Road in Munising Township in Alger County when they saw something lying in the mud at the side of the road.

The couple often drives the county’s dirt roads picking up cans and watching for wildlife.

What Mary saw in the mud on her 59th birthday, roughly 2.5 miles south of Highway 58, was something she first thought was a ball.

“We have a little dog at home that likes to play and so I told Elmer to go and get the ball for the dog,” Mary said.

But the closer Elmer got, the more sure he was it wasn’t a ball.

“I thought it was one of those mushroom things,” Elmer said. “I thought it was one of those puffball things.”

But what was lying in the mud, near the base of a hemlock tree, was a very large whitish egg. The Irishes took the egg home and measured it.

“I’ve been outdoors my whole life fishing and hunting and I’ve never found one of those,” Mary said. “We’ve been all over the U.S. without finding something like that.”

The egg weighed more than three pounds and measured 19.5 inches around on the long side and 15.5 inches around on the short side.

Placing the egg in a cardboard box at their home in Christmas, the couple began to find out what kind of egg it might be.

“I was hoping it wouldn’t hatch out in the house,” Mary said. “It’s a wonder coons hadn’t tried to get it open.”

The egg, which had an odor to it, perhaps from the mud,was discovered in an area of mixed forest, where water had recently puddled from spring run-off.

There are houses located within a couple miles of the site.

Elmer, , 68, who previously farmed hogs and beef cattle downstate near Battle Creek, said he didn’t think the egg was anything he’d seen before.

“I thought maybe it’s an ostrich egg, but it’s too big for that,” Elmer said.

Emu eggs are emerald green color and rhea eggs are smaller. Ostrich eggs are the largest of all bird eggs, but the smallest in relationship to the size of the bird.

Photographs of the Irish egg were sent by The Mining Journal to the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History in Los Angeles, which is home to a research collection of 112,000 specimens representing more than 5,400 species, or nearly 60 percent of the world’s modern birds.

The bird collections, among the largest in western North America, include 95,700 study skins, 2,000 flat skins, 10,450 complete skeletons, 3,000 fluid-preserved specimens and 2,500 tissue samples.

Ornithology Collections Manager Kimball Garrett said the egg found in Alger County indeed belongs to an ostrich — a bird native to Africa — which typically lays 15 to 20 spherical-shaped, cream-colored eggs.

“It’s certainly an ostrich egg —size, color, and pitted appearance are just right,” Garrett said. “I don’t have a clue what it was doing in the Michigan woods.”

Garrett said ostriches are bred commonly in most states, but he wasn’t aware of any “feral” populations.

Jack Miller, a Seney resident who has raised exotic birds including rheas and emus for nearly 30 years, agreed. He said it’s very unlikely an ostrich could survive the cold of the Upper Peninsula winter.

Even if on ostrich could make it through a winter by protecting itself from the cold in thick cover, finding food would be difficult, without someone feeding it, he said.

“What would they eat to survive, up here in the jack pines and cedar swamps,” Miller asked.

Jim Isleib, Alger County agent for Michigan State University Extension, said he thinks it would be very doubtful escaped ostriches could survive long enough to breed in the local area.

“I have a hard time believing there are ostriches out there roaming the countryside,” Isleib said. “I absolutely cannot believe we have any breeding ostriches out there.”

Miller said he doesn’t know of anyone currently raising ostriches locally, and he said he likely would.

At this point, it is unknown how long the egg was sitting in the location before the Irishes found it.

Miller said usually after a couple of weeks, an egg would no longer be viable and incubating would not produce a chick.

Garrett said the most likely scenario is that somebody placed the egg at the location.

“The normal clutch size is very large, so if there was just one egg, and no ostrich around, then it was clearly transported there from somewhere else,” Garrett said.

Perhaps the egg is someone’s discarded conversation piece or was placed at the edge of the road as a joke or a hoax.

Mary said she isn’t sure what to think about the egg now. She said she plans to keep the egg and wonders what an X-ray might show.

Meanwhile, the mystery remains of how the world’s largest bird egg wound up in the mud off an Alger County back road.