SLIDELL, La. — There are many kinds of birds that call south Louisiana home, but it’s not every day you see an emu running through your neighborhood.
“We were over here working, and a guy was jogging, coming from down the road and we noticed this emu behind him and he started running faster and the faster he ran, the faster the emu started running,” O’Neal Galloway said.
Last Thursday, a St. Tammany Sheriff’s Deputy spotted the 80-pound bird on a street in the Coin du Lestin subdivision near Slidell.
Galloway found himself face-to-face with the emu.
“The feet were just humungous on this thing,” he said. “It had claws like you couldn’t imagine. I was thinking I don’t want one of those claws to even get near me because it was pretty serious.”
Tiffany Lane also kept her distance.
“It almost seemed cartoon like, playful, not real,” Lane said. “It has such an odd shape to it. The legs were thicker than I would have thought.”
Emus can run up to 35 miles-an-hour and jump up to 7 feet.
The bird jumped a 5-foot fence and ended up in Galloway’s yard.
“When we saw that one jump the fence here, I was just like whoa, look at this bird go,” Galloway said. “That’s when the sheriff’s office came. It was pretty exciting.”
Galloway and the deputy tried to secure the emu.
“We kind of fooled with it for an hour or so,” he said. “I ended up roping it and tying it to a tree. It was like a half inch rope, and it broke that rope which we were all totally amazed.”
More deputies arrived. There was a foot pursuit. They eventually cornered the emu and returned him safely to his owner without incident.
“It was a beautiful creature,” Lane said. “Really unusual."
The sheriff’s office said Mr. Mu lives in an enclosure in the Coin du Lestin subdivision with his mate, Mrs. Mu and their keeper Mr. Russell.
No word on how the bird escaped.