Quail Run Ostrich Ranch: A Gem In the Hills

Part 4 of SoCal 2020, A Trip for the Soul

The Quail Run Ostrich Ranch in Lake Hughes, California, offers tours and sells chicks and eggs. There are about forty birds on the property, half adults and half babies. I show up for my tour time and TK, the owner, introduces me to three ostriches in a pen like one you’d find for horses on many farms. Another car drives onto the dusty lot, and three adults and three little girls spill out. The wind whips our faces.

TK rattles off information: they’ve been around since the Mesozoic era, they can live up to 75 years in captivity (about double of that in the wild), ostrich oil is an excellent salve for illness and injury, and the male has black feathers so he can camouflage at night when he sits on the nest, while the female and juveniles are brown and camouflage with the ground during the day.

They are an odd-looking species: spindly dinosaur legs, plump, feathered bodies, furry leopard-like necks, little heads, big eyes, and big beaks. They are the only birds with two toes on each foot, they have three stomachs, they don’t fly, and they are the fastest two-legged creatures on earth.

She lets us feed them alfalfa hay; the three girls on the tour have differing levels of bravery. One coils back as the ostrich lunges at the hay, then smiles and laughs as the bird munches on the offering.

At a different yard, a brown and white goat named Jack takes a liking to me, or just wants a nibble of my notepad, camera case, or sweatshirt. Up on a little hillside we see the large conglomerate of baby ostriches, some the size of medium-sized dogs but most about a third or half that of an adult.

Throughout the tour, TK extolls the virtue of ostrich meat. It’s 98% fat free, rich in iron, and more environmentally friendly than the bovine version. Similarly, she boasts about the advantages of ostrich eggs over chicken eggs – you can refrigerate them longer (for as much as a year), and you get more product per bird. And then there’s the oil, which TK says she used to cure an injury less than half the time it would have taken with traditional medicine.

The tour concludes with a stop in a shed that is part storeroom, part gift shop. TK makes shiny, decorative pieces out of hollowed-out ostrich eggs, lining them with jewels and placing figurines inside of them. She shows Cinderella’s coach in earnest to one of the kids. She also has non-ostrich souvenirs, like honey made on the ranch, leather pouches, and homemade jewelry.

Altogether it’s one of the more unusual tours I’ve ever taken. Curiosity, in this case, is sated.

Visited: October 25, 2020