King Island emu
King Island emu.
The King Island emu lived on King Island, in the Bass Strait between mainland Australia and Tasmania. This extinct subspecies, the smallest of all emus, may have exhibited insular dwarfism. It had darker plumage, black and brown, with naked blue skin on the neck, and its chicks were striped like those on the mainland. The behaviour of the King Island emu probably did not differ much from that of the mainland emu. They fed on berries, grass and seaweed. They ran swiftly, and could defend themselves by kicking. Europeans discovered the subspecies in 1802. The French naturalist François Péron wrote about the bird after conducting an interview with a seal hunter, and in 1807 the artist Charles Alexandre Lesueur sketched a head, wing and feathers possibly belonging to this subspecies. In 1804 two live King Island emus were sent to France, where they were kept in the Jardin des plantes until they died in 1822, probably the last of their kind.
The King Island emu lived on King Island, in the Bass Strait between mainland Australia and Tasmania. This extinct subspecies, the smallest of all emus, may have exhibited insular dwarfism. It had darker plumage, black and brown, with naked blue skin on the neck, and its chicks were striped like those on the mainland. The behaviour of the King Island emu probably did not differ much from that of the mainland emu. They fed on berries, grass and seaweed. They ran swiftly, and could defend themselves by kicking. Europeans discovered the subspecies in 1802. The French naturalist François Péron wrote about the bird after conducting an interview with a seal hunter, and in 1807 the artist Charles Alexandre Lesueur sketched a head, wing and feathers possibly belonging to this subspecies. In 1804 two live King Island emus were sent to France, where they were kept in the Jardin des plantes until they died in 1822, probably the last of their kind.
