Rooster Cogburn Ostrich Farm

As I mentioned in my previous post, when we left Tucson over Spring Break, we stopped just north of Tucson in a town called Picacho, AZ. This little town houses an attraction known as the Rooster Cogburn Ostrich Farm. We've seen the sign for this place many times while driving to and from our home in Tucson. But this was the first time we actually stopped to have a look. We had left home relatively early on a Saturday so we were at the farm by around 10AM.

The first thing I noticed about the farm was that it wasn't just ostriches. They also featured goats, donkeys, deer, and lorikeets (a type of bird). The attraction is that you get to feed all of them if you like. For the entrance fee of $5, you get a cup of compressed alfalfa hay to feed the animals, a small cup of nectar for the lorikeets.

Once you move from the entrance to inside the farm, you get to enter a section where you get to feed the deer. They were probably the most gentle of the animals we fed, and they were Lauren's favorite, and she kept asking to go back inside the deer area to feed more of them.

After the deer came the a wall of goats. There were holes in the wall and goats would stick their heads in the holes to get fed from humans. Lauren wasn't as thrilled about the goats. Next came the ostriches, who actually were quite aggressive, and there were warnings about them posted. Rather than feeding them directly you poured their food into either trays they pecked at (being careful to do it when they weren't near so you wouldn't get pecked), or dropped the food in tubes that let the food fall into trays on the other side of the fence. Lauren liked this concept since she didn't have to get near the ostriches, who seemed quite mean to her.

After the ostriches, was a section of donkeys who were quite tame as well, but Lauren didn't find them as attractive as the deer, and kept running back to the deer section after each visit to a new animal. The final attraction before the lorikeets were a bunch of goats placed high in a cage on a large cherry picker. The object was to put food on bowls on a conveyor belt, which you then turned to bring the food up to the goats. It was amusing for one try and then Lauren lost interest.

The final section was the lorikeets, thes bright colorful birds that you got to stand and feed while they came and rested all over your body. Lauren didn't like the sound of that at all, nor did Lauris. Lauren though agreed to go with me inside the aviary to feed the birds. She didn't want to hold on to the cup of nectar so she let me do it. The birds came quickly to rest on my body, and they fought with each other on my hand to get at the nectar. While Lauren didn't have any nectar, two lorikeets landed on her head which scared her quite a bit, but she was brave, and they did no harm to her.

All in all, it was quite an adventure and Lauren had a lot of fun feeding the various animals.