If you take the time to think about it, which we at Uproxx do all the time, there’s something extremely unnerving about the fact that birds don’t have arms. They just traipse around, with these big, huge bodies on tiny little stick legs, with nothing to brace them if their feet get tangled.
But if you thought a lowly pigeon, bobbing its head around, showing off its shimmery coat without arms was unsettling, imagine if that pigeon was running 30 miles per hour. Now imagine it’s 30 times larger and chasing you!
That’s what happened to these unlucky, then very lucky guys.
While enjoying a training ride through Cape Town, South Africa, cyclist Oleksiy Mishchenko managed to record a huge, aggressive ostrich vehemently pursuing his friends at speeds of over 30 mph. According to Mishchenko, the cyclists were passing through a quiet portion of their ride when the creature emerged from a bush and a chase ensued. Fortunately, the ostrich lost interest shortly before the road hit a dead end.
This is honestly the stuff of nightmares. Mishchenko may have been laughing but we can’t be sure we’d have been doing the same. That bird is HUGE and did you happen to catch the pterodactyl screams it was emitting? Plus, that ostrich is running so fast its neck can’t keep up. If you look closely, you’ll notice the way it’s struggling to stay under that tiny little head.
But truly, what would have happened if the ostrich caught them? To reiterate, it doesn’t have arms so how much damage could it actually have done? One word: Talons.