Tracing the ancestry of the flightless birds

BABY emus have hatched at Stonehall Farm in Limerick. According to Sinead Shanahan of the visitor farm and RTÉ’s Mooney Goes Wild programme, this is the second year in which the birds have bred; a chick was born during Easter last year.

This year the daddy emu, Eric, sat on 10 eggs for about 50 days and there are now six babies.

The Limerick emus could not be farther from home; these birds are natives of Australia. Not quite as big as an ostrich, an adult emu may be 1.75 metres tall and two-thirds of the weight of an average-sized man.