Just Another 911 Call, Country-Style

Got a call this afternoon from one of my best friends.  He was laughing so hard on the phone that it was almost impossible to understand him at first.

Seems that while he was driving home this afternoon, he encountered coming toward him, on a relatively major road to boot, an *emu.*  Really.  He sent me the pictures below as proof, since Thing One's initial reaction was to ask me if I thought he might be driving drunk!

   
As he tells it, he felt ridiculous calling 911, but like my incident years ago with the runaway horse, this kind of call to 911 is relatively common around here since escaped livestock are a big hazard on the roads.   Police officers actually carry large-animal ropes in the trunks of their cars for this reason.  Even in this very rural and agricultural part of the country, however, the term "livestock" does not generally encompass large flightless birds from the Southern Hemisphere.  I suspect he thought that the dispatcher would think he was driving drunk too!!

However, when he called, the reaction was, "Oh good.  Where are you?  We've been looking for that bird."

Priceless.  Never a dull moment!