There's a leggy Essex bird in our front room and she's just eaten the car keys...: At home with the family who live with Beaky the 12-stone emu



Hang on, this can’t be right. Turning off a B-road in Essex, my taxi driver appears to have pulled into the world’s most boring street.



Characterless pale-bricked houses with flat UPVC windows line either side of the grey pavements and wheelie bins stand like sentries outside white plastic doors.



It’s the John Major of streets. The sort of cul-de-sac where you imagine the prize for most exotic pet would be won by someone’s hamster. Maybe a budgie or two. A parakeet, at a push.

The Australian outback it is not: Iain and Lisa Newby with their six children and emu Beaky

It’s certainly not the kind of street you expect to find a fully-grown emu wandering around someone’s living room. Yet, within minutes of arriving at Iain Newby’s five-bedroom detached home, I come face-to-beak with Beaky, a 6ft tall emu who seems to think she’s human.



Two-year-old Beaky lives cosily alongside Iain and his family in this quintessentially suburban corner of Southend-on-Sea, Essex.



The Australian outback it is not. Yet the 12 st bird seems more than happy to rub alongside her non-feathered family — 44-year-old Iain, his wife Lisa, 36, and their five very boisterous sons and one daughter, aged from ten months to eight.

It’s a most curious sight. Iain — a cross between Crocodile Dundee and Status Quo’s Rick Parfitt — welcomes me in and guides me through the living room where Lisa is vacuuming and several blonde-haired children are tearing in and out with their toys.



So far, so relatively normal.



But then, at the back of the house, I spy a vast wooden porch. And there, through the windowless frames, I catch my first glimpse of Beaky and she doesn’t seem at all pleased to see me.



She gives me the evil eye as I approach her tentatively, gradually becoming more aware of a strange bongo-like sound she seems to be producing as she struts up and down the garden.



‘That’s the sound she makes when she’s unsure about something, so it’s just a warning signal,’ says Iain.

‘It’s an air pocket at the base of her throat that she pops and it makes that sound. But don’t worry, she’s just sizing you up. She’s a bit wary of strangers, but she won’t bite you. She’s very tame.’



Jill Foster tries to win Beaky's affections further by showing her a little present she has brought in the shape of a Rod Hull-style emu hand puppet

Reassured, I move a little closer.

‘She’s more likely to kick you,’ he adds.



It’s clear I’m the newbie in the Newby house, and Beaky doesn’t like it.

But after five minutes she seems to have decided I’m no threat, so I venture to pet her. Close-up, I’m surprised by how pretty she really is.



Her large brown glassy marbles of eyes peer at me through long Liz Taylor eyelashes. She has a long, elegant blue and emerald-coloured neck, covered in soft black down.



Her body is a huge puffball of pale brown and white plumage, slightly damp from the rain. But it’s her ugliest feature which transfixes me — her strong, thick legs with razor-sharp claws which could rip apart a wire fence (not to mention a nervous journalist) with one sharp kick.



Having established I am friend not foe, I try to win Beaky’s affections further by showing her a little present I’ve brought in the shape of a Rod Hull-style emu hand puppet.



Big mistake. Beaky is not amused (or should that be emu-sed?)



She eyeballs her stuffed-toy lookalike and, for a moment, I fear she’s going to give me the Michael Parkinson treatment. But Beaky merely struts off in a diva-like strop. The message is clear: there’s only room for one emu around these parts.



Emus — or Dromaius novaehollandaie to give them their scientific name — are native to Australia and the second largest bird in the world in height, next to the ostrich.



Given the space, they can reach speeds of up to 40 mph and Beaky could — if she had a run-up of 100 m or so — jump over a 6 ft fence.



Not that it’s possible in this garden, which can be no bigger than 60 ft long and 15 ft wide. And not that she seems in any way keen to make a run for it (I suspect she realises just what a cushy number she has here).



Beaky was a gift to Iain from his wife for Christmas two years ago and has been part of the family since.



Emus are native to Australia and the second largest bird in the world in height, next to the ostrich

‘Lisa bought me an egg from an emu farm,’ says Iain.



‘It arrived in the post in bubble wrap and I didn’t think it would hatch. But I made an incubator and put it inside, just in case.



‘Lisa was expecting our Peter and the midwife came and checked her out and then put her stethoscope on the egg and said: “Iain, I think there’s movement. I think there’s something in here”, and I was really surprised.



‘A few days later, the egg started breaking up and the first thing we saw was a massive beak poking out. Straight away Lisa said: “Ah, Beaky” and that’s how she got her name.’



Beaky was immediately welcomed into the large Newby clan.



‘She’s convinced the children are her siblings and loves being with them,’ says Iain.



‘I put her in one of their old playpens and she’d sit with us in the living room and eat at the same time. But within a few months she was already 3 ft tall and could leap out of it.



‘She used to sleep in what is now my office, but as she got older she needed more space, so I built her a hut outside.



'But if we’re all out we usually leave the television on for company and if we haven’t locked the back porch properly, she’ll undo the catch, sneak in, sit there on the carpet and watch TV.



‘We’ll come back and see that a couple of ornaments have been knocked over, but she’ll be happily sitting there watching the box.’



While the children clearly love being with the big bird, Iain’s wife Lisa may be starting to rue the day she ever bought Beaky home.



‘It’s not ideal her bringing all that mud in from the garden when you’ve got little ones crawling around,’ she says, shaking her head.



As if on cue, Beaky suddenly has a little accident. Lisa, clearly used to such behaviour, merely sighs and fetches the mop.



Next up it’s feeding time. The mighty bird may not peck, but she’s certainly peckish. Although she can eat 14lbs of corn a week and about 5lbs of fruit and vegetables, including broccoli, peas and cauliflower, it’s still not enough to satisfy a hungry emu.



‘She’ll eat anything,’ explains Iain. ‘Drill bits, scouring sponges, keys . . . even money. A friend put his change and a £10 note on the window ledge just for a second and she grabbed it and it was gone. I tried to stop her, but it went down in one.’

'Beaky's convinced the children are her siblings and loves being with them,' said Iain. She's not the family's only animal

But despite the occasional disaster, Beaky does earn her keep.



Last year, she laid an impressive 18 eggs — each about ten times the size of a chicken’s — during her laying season between January and March.



‘One egg can feed the entire family,’ says Iain. ‘They take about 20 minutes to soft boil. We sit around the table with slices of toast and all get a dip, it’s great.’



Beaky may be the Newbys’ most impressive pet, but she’s by no means the family’s only animal.



Located around the house in ponds, cages, pens, incubators — not to mention the 130 ft outbuilding that Iain built in the back garden for various lizards, spiders and snakes — are more than 200 creatures.



As he lists them, it sounds like the roll call at Chester Zoo.



‘We’ve got macaws, parrots, 11 large Mediterranean tortoises, a piranha, turtles, soft-shelled turtles, iguanas, leopard geckos, plated lizards, bearded dragons, tarantulas, a scorpion, horn snakes, king snakes, a 15 ft reticulated python, Burmese pythons, boa constrictors, rat snakes, two crocs, four dogs, five cats, a African dwarf hedgehog. Oh and an alligator — who isn’t here at the moment.’



Er, sorry? Where do you put the alligator when he ‘isn’t here at the moment’?



‘There’s a reptile reserve in Upminster, in Essex — he’s with a female up there.’



Ever any escapees? Iain thinks for a moment. ‘None that we’ve never got back’



The animals aren’t all pets. In fact, Beaky is the only one in that category.



For the Newby’s family home is actually a sanctuary for vulnerable and abandoned creatures.



Iain set up the The Dangerous Wild Animal Rescue Facility 18 years ago, and it’s still the only rescue centre of its kind.



If the family haven't locked the back porch properly, Beaky will undo the catch, sneak in, sit on the carpet and watch TV

It now helps up to 30 animals a week, and Iain and Lisa receive about 20 calls a day from people who have either discovered an animal or can’t cope with one they have bought.



The night before I visit, someone had turned up at their door with five baby hedgehogs. I’m not sure they fulfil the ‘dangerous’ criteria but, all the same, Lisa is now lovingly hand-rearing them with pipettes of milk.



‘When the animals come here, we do our best to feed them and look after them, whereas other places might put them down,’ says Iain.

It’s purely a labour of love. The sanctuary makes no money — in fact it costs £500 a month just to heat the creature-filled outbuilding — and relies on volunteers. To fund it all, Iain has a full-time job in Hertfordshire distributing medical devices for asthma.



It’s perhaps not surprising to learn that he was born on a game reserve in Lusaka in Zambia in 1967, where his father John, a TV wildlife presenter and mother Margaret, a nurse, ran educational school camps. The family moved to the UK in 1971, just as apartheid was rearing its ugly head.



‘My early childhood was spent with all kinds of wild animals,’ says Iain. ‘My father hand-reared a lion called Major and we had an elephant called Jumbolina.



‘One of my earliest memories is my father and a fully-grown chimp rocking me in my cot. It could have easily ripped my head off, but Dad was confident he wouldn’t harm me.



'But, having said that, Dad later told me that Mum was standing at the other side of the room with a double-barrelled shotgun in her hand aimed at the chimp’s head.



‘She’d not only have blown away the chimp but probably me and my dad, too, with a gun like that, but it was just her way of saying to Dad: “You can show him the chimp, but it’s your life you’re messing with”.’



Iain has 462 scars inflicted by various creatures — many of them received during his 11 years as a zookeeper at various parks and wildlife centres in the Nineties.



He’s grappled with lions, tigers, leopards and rescued several crocodiles and alligators that have escaped from their owners.



And in fact, it was a mutual love of reptiles that brought Iain and Lisa together when they met in an Essex nightclub ten years ago.



‘She turned me down for a dance, but then overheard me talking to her friend about an iguana I’d rescued. She had two pet iguanas.



‘She came back to my house with friends. I got out my 4 ft iguana and placed it in front of her. She spent the whole night cuddling it. We got married five years later. At first we decided it was just going to be the two of us. We weren’t going to have any children. But something went a bit wrong there.’



With six children and 200 animals to care for, one might expect Lisa to look thoroughly exhausted. But as she busies herself around the house — feeding babies, feeding hedgehogs, picking up toys — she is slim, tanned and upbeat.



‘She’s got her hands full,’ agrees Iain. ‘She gets up at 3.30am to prepare the food for the animals and I sleep in until 4am. Then I come down and join her, make Beaky’s breakfast and let her out as it’s getting light.



‘I’ll check the outbuilding and, by the time I’ve done that, Lisa will have fed the guinea pigs and the rabbit and sorted out the dogs’ food and done a bit out in the garden.



‘We get the children up around 7am after we’ve sorted the animals. We feed them, then I go to work around ten, come home in the early evening, check on the animals, then relax over a couple of beers and have dinner with the family.



‘By 9pm, when the children are in bed, that’s us finished.’



Their dream is to build their own purpose-built rescue centre in rather more suitable surroundings.



‘If I won the lottery, I’d be buying 50 or 60 acres,’ he says.

‘I’d have thatched cottages for people to stay in. We’d invite photographers to take pictures or invite students to come and study endangered species.’



And Beaky? Emus can live up to 60 years, so it’s likely she’ll outlive Iain.



‘Oh yeah, she’d come, too — she’d be the star.’



And with that, the taxi arrives to whisk me home.

