The Army That Lost To Birds

An army once lost to birds. Send this to the friend who says history is dull. In late nineteen thirty-two, wheat farmers in Western Australia were losing their crop to emus, tall flightless birds that had arrived in their thousands looking for water and found fields of grain instead.

The farmers asked the government for help, and the government sent soldiers with two machine guns and ten thousand rounds of ammunition. On paper it was not a fair fight. In the fields it went rather differently. Emus run fast, turn sharply and take a great deal of stopping, and after the first bursts of fire the flocks broke into small scattered groups and simply kept moving. The guns jammed. A truck was tried, and the ground was far too rough to aim from.

After about a month the soldiers went home. Fewer than one thousand birds had been killed out of a crowd many times that size, newspapers around the world had a wonderful time with the story, and the emus, who never knew that war had been declared, went back to eating the wheat.