In 1932, when farmers were withholding their wheat, they were simultaneously forced to contend with a massive migratory group of emus. The emus came along their migratory path in the fall, and initially, as roughly 20,000 emus descended into the Campion District, farmers tried to fight against them themselves.

According to Scientific American, by late 1932, the 20,000 birds were “wreaking havoc on the marginal wheat farms of the beleaguered veterans, and even these men, trained riflemen, who felled thousands of the mighty birds, could not put a dent in their numbers.” At one point, some boys reportedly killed as many as 27 emus in a single day by riding around on bicycles and “swatting the birds in the head with sticks as they sped by,” writes History Nuggets. A similar endeavor was attempted with a truck, but the truck’s engine was too loud and scared away the emus.

The farmers panicked because not only did they need the harvest to make money, but they also needed it as “leverage against the government.” After a while, the emus had also started catching on to what was going on, so despite continuing to eat the farmers’ crops, they also became wary of humans and wouldn’t allow them to get close.

However, since the farmers didn’t trust the Ministry of Agriculture, they instead turned to the minister of defense for help.

The operation was initially planned for early October 1932. Two machine gunners, Sergeant S. McMurray and Gunner J. O’Halloran, were assigned to the mission and given two Lewis light machine guns.

Along with Major G.P.W. Meredith and the Fox movietone cameraman, they headed to the Campion district. According to History Nuggets, “The Farmer’s Agricultural Bank [had also] agreed to front the government for the ammunition, to be repaid out of the farmers’ future profits,” so the men brought 10,000 rounds of ammo with them.

Modern Farmer writes that the group arrived “ready to decimate the interloping emus,” but the rain arrived just as they did. As a result, the emus scattered for a month. Per their agreement, the farmers housed the men over the course of the month in the town of Perth. When the rain finally ceased and the emus returned, the soldiers headed once again to the Campion district. On their way, they saw a group of 40 to 50 emus, and Major Meredith decided that it was time to start the culling.

The next day, the soldiers managed to kill nine emus, but not before the birds “devastated a local farm.” Two days later, the soldiers ambushed a group of 1,000 emus. Since they had waited quietly for the emus to approach them, the birds were hit at point-blank range, and between 10 and 12 emus fell. However, Scientific American writes that at that point, the machine gun jammed, and the emus scattered.

Newspapers were soon reporting that “the emus have proved that they are not so stupid as they are usually considered to be.” Modern Farmer notes that the emus quickly figured out that the machine guns had a limited range, so “the majority of birds escaped ensuing confrontations with their lives intact.”

Strange History writes that one plan involved putting a machine gun on the back of a truck, but “not a single bird was killed, not a single bullet was shot (the gunner had problems enough hanging on) and a stretch of fence was destroyed when the truck [careened] into it.”

By November 8, out of the 10,000 rounds of ammunition brought for the mission, 2,500 had been used, with only 200 dead birds to show for it. Plus, in an ironic twist, when the emus ran to avoid the soldiers, even more farmland was destroyed by their powerful legs, according to How Stuff Works.

Although there were no casualties on the human side, by the time the bullets were used up by the soldiers, fewer than 1,000 emus had been killed. History Nuggets writes that in his final report, Major Meredith offered a “suspiciously easily divisible number of 986 birds” that were killed using 9,860 rounds of ammunition. He also claimed that 2,500 more had died from wounds, though he didn’t indicate how he determined that number.

History of Yesterday writes that it’s estimated that the Emu War had “one of the worst bullet-to-kill ratios in military history.” After the war, much of the public was also on the side of the emus, having been disgusted by images of the slaughter, such as it was. News of the Emu War even reached Great Britain, where animal conservationists protested the war and “decried the extermination of a rare bird,” writes Modern Farmer.

According to “Crocodile Undone” by Marcus Baynes-Rock, the Agricultural Board tried to get the farmers to reimburse them for the cost of ammunition, but the farmers claimed that they were, in fact, owed money since they were the ones slaughtering birds wounded by the machine guns: “It was a farce that cut straight to the weak underbelly of colonialism. It highlighted white Australians’ awkwardness in engaging with the land and their hopeless reliance on traditional methods of colonization  — militarism, exclusion, and eradication — in the face of a recalcitrant ecology.”

In the 1970s, farmers decided to start farming emus instead of fighting them, and the first farmed emus were created. According to “Crocodile Undone,” this began with capturing wild emus and, in ironic juxtaposition, feeding them primarily wheat. By the 1990s, emu farming had caught on in all of the Australian states, and by the mid-1990s, there were over 60,000 emus being farmed in Australia.

With the birds’ protected status, the emu population in Australia is estimated to be at least 600,000, and they have been classified as being “of least concern.” However, according to Scientific American, wild populations of emus remain “at risk of local extinction due to encroaching human activity.”

While it’s unclear whether or not the emus remember the Emu War, humans who heard about it found it as entertaining then as they do now. In the end, ornithologist D.L. Serventy summarized the Emu War the best: “The machine-gunners’ dreams of point blank fire into serried masses of Emus were soon dissipated. The Emu command had evidently ordered guerrilla tactics, and its unwieldy army soon split up into innumerable small units that made use of the military equipment uneconomic. A crestfallen field force therefore withdrew from the combat area after about a month.”