No, there are no wild ostrich populations living in the United States. Every ostrich in America is either on a farm, in a zoo, or an occasional escapee. Despite more than a century of ostrich farming across the country, these birds have never established a self-sustaining feral population on American soil.
Why Ostriches Haven’t Gone Wild in the U.S.
Ostriches have been raised in America since the 1880s, giving them plenty of theoretical opportunity to establish wild populations. In 1883, an Englishman named Charles Sketchley brought twenty-two ostriches to the Anaheim area of Southern California, launching what would become a booming industry. Between 1883 and 1911, ostrich farms popped up across Southern California in cities like Fullerton, Pasadena, Santa Monica, and San Diego. These operations were so popular that investors built a dedicated Ostrich Farm Railway in 1886 to shuttle tourists to the attractions.
That first wave focused on feathers for fashion. A second wave came in the 1980s and 1990s, when ostrich meat and leather became trendy investments, spreading farms across Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma, and other states. Through both booms, birds inevitably escaped. Yet none of those escapes led to a breeding population in the wild. The reasons come down to biology and environment. Ostriches are native to the dry savannas and open plains of sub-Saharan Africa. While parts of the American Southwest look superficially similar, the combination of predators (coyotes, mountain lions), harsh winters in most of the country, unfamiliar vegetation, and fragmented habitat makes long-term survival unlikely for a 250-pound flightless bird that can’t exactly hide.
Escapes Happen More Often Than You’d Think
Ostriches do get loose in the U.S. with surprising regularity. Local news stations cover ostrich-on-the-highway stories a few times a year, usually ending with animal control wrangling the bird back to its owner. But one incident in 2024 showed just how many birds can get loose at once. In May of that year, devastating flooding in Bosque County, Texas, swept nearly 200 ostriches off the Superior Ostrich ranch between Clifton and Waco. The water rose overnight, catching the ranch owner off guard. Of those birds, only 32 were recovered alive, 12 were confirmed dead, and an estimated 80 to 90 remained unaccounted for.
Even with that many birds loose in rural Texas, there’s been no sign of a breeding group forming. Escaped ostriches tend to stay near roads and human settlements, where they’re conspicuous enough to be spotted quickly. They don’t disperse into remote wilderness the way a smaller, more adaptable bird might. Most are recaptured, hit by vehicles, or killed by predators within days or weeks.
Ostriches Are Classified as Livestock, Not Wildlife
Legally, ostriches in the U.S. are treated as agricultural animals. The USDA classifies them as ratites, a group that also includes emus, cassowaries, kiwis, and rheas. Federal regulations require that ratites be permanently identified, and imports are overseen by both the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service under international trade agreements. This means ostriches are tracked and regulated much like cattle or poultry. There’s no wildlife management framework for wild ostriches because, from a regulatory standpoint, they simply don’t exist in the wild here.
What About Emus?
If you’ve seen reports of large flightless birds roaming free in the U.S., you may be thinking of emus rather than ostriches. Emus, which are smaller and native to Australia, escape from farms just as often and tend to generate similar headlines. In South Carolina, a pair of feral emus nicknamed Thelma and Louise roamed the towns of Green Sea, Duford, and Nichols long enough to become local celebrities, showing up on trail cameras and sparking hundreds of comments on community Facebook groups. Scattered feral emus have been reported in Texas, Florida, and other states. However, like ostriches, emus have not established a true wild population in North America. Individual birds or small groups survive for months or even years, but there’s no evidence of sustained breeding in the wild.
The two birds are easy to confuse at a distance. Ostriches stand up to 9 feet tall with black and white plumage on males, while emus top out around 6 feet with shaggy brown-gray feathers. If you spot a large flightless bird running through a field somewhere in the American South, it’s almost certainly an escaped farm animal, and more likely an emu than an ostrich.
Ostrich Relatives Once Lived Here Naturally
Here’s a detail that surprises most people: close relatives of the modern ostrich actually did live in North America, roughly 50 million years ago. Fossils discovered in a former lake bed in Wyoming’s Green River Formation revealed a previously unknown species called Calciavis grandei, a bird closely related to today’s ostriches, kiwis, and emus. Two nearly complete skeletons were found with bones, feathers, and soft tissues still intact. Sterling Nesbitt, a paleontologist at Virginia Tech who co-authored the research, noted that this discovery shows the bird group containing today’s largest flightless species once had a much wider range and a longer evolutionary history in North America than scientists previously understood.
These ancient birds lived during the Eocene epoch, when Wyoming’s climate was warm and subtropical. They vanished from the continent long before anything resembling modern North American ecosystems took shape. So while America once had its own ostrich cousins, that chapter closed tens of millions of years before humans arrived.