Ostrich Trivia
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47 free Ostrich trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
The ostrich is the largest, heaviest and fastest-running bird alive, and this quiz gets into what makes it so odd: two toes where every other bird has three or four, eyes bigger than any land vertebrate's, a kick measured at 225 kilograms of force, feathers with no hooks, a flat breastbone with no keel, and a habit of separating urine from faeces that no other bird shares. It covers the eggs too: 1.4 kg each, twenty times a hen's, yet the smallest of any bird relative to the mother, laid in a communal pit that a dominant hen tidies of rivals' eggs. It also digs into the ostrich and people: the 'camel-sparrow' name the Greeks gave it, Pliny's head-in-a-bush claim that became the head-in-the-sand myth, Kalahari eggshell water bottles 60,000 years old, Roman arena games, the Victorian feather boom and bust, farming and racing around Oudtshoorn, the extinct Arabian ostrich, and why the birds around one South African town are statistically the most dangerous in the world. Easy questions ask which continent and how many toes; hard ones want tarsus lengths, incubation days and lung capacities. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's article on the common ostrich, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Our Emu and Birds quizzes go wider.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The ostrich is native to which continent?
Africa
Africa: feather hunters had almost wiped ostriches out there by the 18th century, and farming the birds for their plumes instead probably saved them.
Q 02A male ostrich's booming call is often compared to which sound?
A lion's roar
A lion's roar: the low, muffled boom carries across great distances, warning rival males off his territory and telling hens he is ready to mate.
Q 03In Egyptian myth, the hearts of the dead were weighed against the ostrich feather of which goddess?
Maat
Maat: in the Book of the Dead, a heart heavier than her feather of truth was fed to a waiting monster, the 'devourer of the dead', and its owner was shut out of paradise.
Q 04Which extinct birds laid larger eggs than the ostrich?
The elephant bird and the giant moa
The elephant bird and the giant moa: David Attenborough has treasured an elephant bird egg since he acquired it in Madagascar in 1960, and half a century later he went back to make a film about it.
Q 05A newly hatched ostrich is about the size of which bird?
A chicken
A chicken: the hatchling doesn't stay small for long, growing about 30 cm a month, and at a month old it can already keep up with running adults.
Q 06What colour are an adult male ostrich's feathers?
Mostly black with white wings and tail
Mostly black with white wings and tail: he shows the contrast off when courting, sinking to the ground and waving first one wing, then the other.
Q 07Which part of an ostrich is the largest of its kind in any land animal?
Its eyes
Its eyes: each is about 5 cm across, and perched on that long neck they let an ostrich spot a lion far off and be running before it gets close.
Q 08What is unique about an ostrich's feet among living birds?
Two toes
Two toes: most birds have four, and shedding two is thought to make it a better runner, with the big inner toe built almost like a hoof.
Q 09Why are an ostrich's feathers soft and fluffy rather than sleek?
No hooks to zip the barbs together
No hooks to zip the barbs together: the loose plumes are useless for flight and soak through in rain, since ostriches also lack the oil gland other birds waterproof with.
Q 10What do an ostrich's wings do when it runs?
Act as stabilisers for braking and turning
Act as stabilisers for braking and turning: the wings were long written off as evolutionary leftovers, until researchers filmed sprinting ostriches steering with them like rudders.
Q 11Which ridge, missing from an ostrich's breastbone, anchors the flight muscles of flying birds?
The keel
The keel: flight muscles need that ridge to pull against, so a bird with a flat breastbone like the ostrich's cannot fly at all.
Q 12The ostrich is unique among living birds in doing what?
Secreting urine separately from faeces
Secreting urine separately from faeces: birds famously pass everything as a single dropping, and the ostrich is the one exception, holding the two in separate chambers.
Q 13Since birds descend from them, the ostrich counts as the largest living member of which group?
Dinosaurs
Q 21Lacking teeth, what do ostriches swallow to grind food in the gizzard?
Pebbles
Pebbles: the stones do the chewing in its gizzard, and the habit fed an old belief that ostriches eat iron, which Shakespeare turned into a threat in Henry VI.
Q 22How can an ostrich go for days without drinking?
Water in the plants it eats
Water in the plants it eats: that can carry an ostrich for days, though it drinks readily and even bathes whenever it comes across a waterhole.
Q 23A territorial male ostrich 'booms' by doing what?
Inflating his neck
Inflating his neck: he fills a sac in his throat with air to make the sound, which he uses in the breeding season to hold his patch and his hens against rival males.
Dinosaurs: birds are the one branch that survived, which is why researchers film running ostriches to work out how extinct two-legged dinosaurs moved.
Q 14The ancient Greek name for the ostrich, still used in Greece today, translates as what?
Camel-sparrow
Camel-sparrow: the Greeks also called it simply the 'big sparrow', and Linnaeus kept the camel half when he named the species Struthio camelus.
Q 15Ostriches belong to which group of flightless birds, alongside emus, rheas and kiwis?
Ratites
Ratites: DNA later placed the flying tinamous inside this family tree, which suggests its big birds gave up flight several times over, not just once.
Q 16An Ig Nobel Prize went to a study of British farm ostriches that aimed their courtship displays at what?
Humans
Humans: both cocks and hens displayed more when a person was watching, a quirk the authors warned could affect how well the birds breed on farms.
Q 17DNA from fossil eggshells shows ostriches lived in which country 25,000 years ago?
India
India: the shell fragments came from eight sites in the west and centre of the country, and Stone Age people had already been carving some of them into beads.
Q 18Which country has a feral ostrich population descended from farm escapees?
Australia
Australia: when its ostrich farms went bust the birds were turned loose, and a few lonely survivors still roam the South Australian outback.
Q 19How does an ostrich hide from a predator when it cannot run away?
Lies flat, neck on the ground
Lies flat, neck on the ground: its pale head and neck blend into the soil, so from a distance in the heat haze the bird looks like nothing more than a mound of earth.
Q 20How does a cornered ostrich defend itself?
A slashing forward kick
A slashing forward kick: each foot carries a long, sharp claw, and a single blow can kill a person or even a lion.
Q 24Where do ostrich hens lay their eggs?
In a single communal pit scraped by the male
In a single communal pit scraped by the male: several hens add their eggs to it, so one nest can hold dozens, far more than any one hen could lay.
Q 25An ostrich egg weighs about as much as how many hen's eggs?
24
24: at about 1.4 kg it is the biggest egg of any living bird, yet beside a 100 kg mother it is the smallest of all for her size, so one sitting bird can cover dozens.
Q 26How do ostrich parents share incubation?
Hens sit by day, cocks after dark
Hens sit by day, cocks after dark: each sex takes the shift in which its plumage is hardest to spot on open ground, and the male goes on to do much of the guarding of the chicks.
Q 27In medieval Europe, ostrich plumes were a prized decoration for what?
Knights' helmets
Knights' helmets: the fashion later moved to women's hats, and demand for plumes grew until hunting the birds for their feathers was a global business.
Q 28Which book of the Bible describes the ostrich leaving her eggs in the sand where a foot may crush them?
Job
Job: the passage calls her careless with her young, yet it ends in admiration, saying that when she runs she laughs at the horse and its rider.
Q 29About how long can an ostrich live in captivity?
About 50 years
About 50 years: some captive birds have passed 60, and that long life is why birds set loose from failed farms can still be found roaming decades later.
Q 30Which bird has been known to hurl stones at ostrich eggs to crack them open?
Egyptian vulture
Egyptian vulture: it carries a stone in its bill and flings it at the shell again and again until it cracks, a rare case of a wild bird using a tool.