When Glen Williams resident Tim Corkum couldn’t quiet his dogs down last Thursday, he went out to investigate. He quickly discovered the feathered cause of the commotion - an emu had wandered onto his property.
With the large, flightless birds being native to Australia, not Canada, he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing.
“It was just so unexpected from what I thought I would find,” he said.
On the advice of an emu farmer he called, Corkum trapped the bird in his backyard and made some inquiries. Eventually, he managed to track down the emu’s owner.
But in the meantime, the unbelievable find quickly became the butt of jokes among Corkum and his neighbours, and the community at large on social media.
Tim Corkum photo
“We have this group chat with all the guys. We started talking about having a barbecue,” he joked.
On Facebook, Corkum continued with his sense of humour.
“Meet our new pet emu - Foghorn Leghorn!" he quipped in a post. "It’s part of my five-step process to have our property rezoned as a farm to reduce property taxes. Neighbours aren’t happy, but wait until I start charging their kids $10 each to come have a look."
The emu was quickly taken back by owner Danny Dhaliwal, who's raising two emus and an ostrich, he says, “as a hobby” on a property he owns across from the Georgetown Golf Club.
“It was very windy that day,” Dhaliwal said. When his business partner, Gary Johnson – who takes care of the birds – went to the enclosure to inspect the large birds as he does nightly, he discovered Cheep Cheep the emu was gone.
“The gate of the fence got opened by the heavy wind,” Dhaliwal said. They mounted a futile search as emus can see in the dark and travel great distances – as much 25 km in a day. “We went into the forest [to look for it],but it was too dark.”
The bird is now back on the property. Johnson says his other emu was visibly glad to see the return of Cheep Cheep as they're friends.
“He kept crying out,” Johnson said about what the other emu was doing in Cheep Cheep’s absence. “It was like he was looking for him. Once he came back, he ran up and they just went off together.”
