Couple adds emu to family

REDDING — John and Catherine Kearns were “devastated” when they found their five emu eggs remained unfertile after an intense, 60-day incubation period.

Just as the couple was feeling down on their luck, John Kearns said they got an “unexpected but welcomed surprise” when they were checking on the remaining eggs Monday night.

A baby emu started tottering around in its egg.

“They were just wiggling and you could hear them peeping and scratching against the inside of the egg,” he said.

“If you’ve ever seen ‘Jurassic Park,’ the scene where they watch the velociraptor hatch from the egg, that’s pretty much what it looked like,” he added.

The Kearns, who own the Old Redding Farm, had been eagerly looking to add a pack of emus to their farm for some time and had recently purchased some eggs from a Connecticut farmer.

As they watched the large speckled blue egg wobble and rock back and forth, Catherine Kearns started chirping at it.

“Cheep, cheep, cheep,” she called out as they recorded the slow-moving quivers on video.

John Kearns said the baby started doing what is known as “piping” and tried to make a tiny air hole in the egg’s shell while poking at the top of it until it broke.

By the next morning, the Kearns were greeted by Bazooka, or “Zooka” for short, their very first emu. The bird’s name was conceived from a scene in the movie "Children of Men.”

“It looks adorable, like a little, tiny striped, longnecked chicken,” John Kearns said. “It’s pretty wild.”

The farmer who they got the eggs from told them people actually eat the emu eggs, but the Kearns asked for hatching eggs instead. Their farm is already home to a variety of chickens, dogs and alpacas, but they were looking to spice it up.

“We’re interested in off-beat, weird things,” John Kearns said. “We have some unique varieties of chicken so we wanted to add something that was even more interesting, and emus are just basically bird versions of dinosaurs.”

The Kearns brought home a group of eggs and facilitated their 60-day incubation period at home, chronicling the challenging series of events on their Youtube channel.

Although the first five eggs didn't hatch, they expect to have about three or four emus come breaking through their shells soon. A second emu hatched a couple days after the first.

John Kearns said incubating emu eggs can be difficult because their eggs are much thicker than other birds.

H John Voorhees III / Hearst Connecticut Media John Kearns, of Redding, holds an emu that hatched last week.