Dreambirds [Dream Birds]: The Strange History of the Ostrich in Fashion, Food, and Fortune

Description

Ostriches are curious birds, comfortably fitting into no single biological category--for which reason Carl von Linné, the taxonomist, called it Struthio camelus, the "sparrow-camel." An Arab folktale confirms Linné's choice, relating that when it was asked to choose just which camp it belonged to, the ostrich could not decide whether to be a bird or a mammal, for which God condemned it to live alone in one of the harshest deserts on earth, the Karoo of South Africa. The Karoo, it happens, is Rob Nixon's native ground, and although he has spent much of his adult life in the United States teaching literature, the desert landscape haunts his dreams. (So, too, do ostriches, about which Nixon commands a phenomenal amount of information.) The fantasy of Nixon's subtitle speaks not only to some of his late-night thoughts about the land of his birth, but also to the would-be empires of the Karoo's early European settlers, who sought their fortunes in gold and diamonds--and then, when that did not work, in ostrich feathers, a highly sought fashion commodity as subject to cycles of boom and bust as any other trade good. Nixon charts the fortunes of the Karoo's 19th-century "ostrich elite," updating their story with an appropriately curious recent development: the introduction of industrial ostrich ranching to the American Southwest, where a new generation of dreamers is hoping to make their fortunes in eggs, leather, meat, and other products. Literate, learned, and endlessly entertaining, Dreambirds is mandatory reading for ostrich fanciers everywhere. --Gregory McNamee