🦜 The Arizona Aviculture Society is delighted to present Janelle Molony.

📅 Date: Saturday, October 10, 2026

⏰ Time: 6:30 PM – 8:00 PM

📍 Location: Faith United Methodist Church; 8640 N. 19th Avenue, Phoenix

Looking forward to this event coming up in October. Save the date. 🗓️ Dr. A.J. Chandler’s Great Arizona Ostrich Drive was in November of 1914. Within five miles of this march (starting in Avondale), the ostriches stampeded, into the wild. Soon, they were spotted near the Mexican border and out east across the deserts of present-day Mesa/Apache Junction.

🌵Ostriches were introduced to Arizona as livestock animals in 1888 and our breeders figured out how to produce feathers so incredibly long, wide and luxurious that we began a (bitter and political) international competition with South Africa… who then sent government spies to try and learn what we were doing.

🥚Ostrich ranching has been an Arizona specialty ever since. Currently, the Rooster Cogburn Ostrich Ranch is the longest continuously operated ostrich ranch in the nation and holds the single largest collection of ostriches in the world, outside of South Africa. Still, the numbers they raise have never come close to our state’s star ranch, which, in the 1900s, held the world’s largest collection, never to have been beat.

👉🏻We’ll talk about historical ostrich care and science, their role in the evolution of animal welfare societies, and of course… the stampede.