Pass the raising of ostrich chicks to full size through the difficulties
of disease, wild beasts, and sheer cussedness. Of the resultant thirty
birds or so of the season's catch, but two or three will even promise
good production. These must be bred in captivity with other likely
specimens. Thus after several years the industrious ostrich farmer may
become possessed of a few really prime birds. To accumulate a proper
flock of such in a new country is a matter of a decade or so. Extra
prime birds are as well known and as much in demand for breeding as any
blood horse in a racing country. Your true ostrich enthusiast, like the
Hills, possesses trunks full of feathers not good commercially, but
intensely interesting for comparison and for the purposes of prophecy.
While I stayed with them came a rumour of a very fine plucking a distant
neighbour had just finished from a likely two-year-old. The Hills were
manifestly uneasy until one of them had ridden the long distance to
compare this newcomer's product with that of their own two-year-olds.
And I shall never forget the reluctantly admiring shake of the head with
which he acknowledged that it was indeed a "very fine feather!"

But getting the birds is by no means all of ostrich farming, as many
eager experimenters have discovered to their cost. The birds must have a
certain sort of pasture land; and their paddocks must be built on an
earth that will not soil or break the edges of the new plumes.

And then there is the constant danger of wild beasts. When a man has
spent years in gathering suitable flocks, he cannot be blamed for wild
anger when, as happened while I was in the country, lions kill sixty or
seventy birds in a night. The ostrich seems to tempt lions greatly. The
beasts will make their way through and over the most complicated
defences. Any ostrich farmer's life is a constant warfare against them.