5 baby emus get out of a Honda Fit ...

The scene at a Whitehorse-area farm earlier this week was like something straight out of a children's book as a flock of baby emus — awkward-legged and long-necked — poured from a Honda Fit like a clown car.

The comical exit was also a moment of deep relief for their owner, Hilary Obermair. The flock of five birds had escaped from their pen on Annie Lake Road.

"I think the first one was hesitant and had resigned to living in a Honda Fit. But after the first one came out, they kind of just waterfalled themselves out of it," laughed Obermair, adding she's learned two important lessons from the ordeal.

"Never underestimate a Fit, and check your fences."

It was thanks to a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend, who spotted them on the road some distance away, that Obermair's partner managed to track the hapless birds and chase them down. Emus can run up to 50 kilometres an hour, but luckily these had gotten themselves penned in again on the opposite side of a barbed wire fence.

Her partner had to tie the wires apart so the birds could hop through.

Then he wrestled them, one at a time, into the back of his car.

After that, it was "total chaos," the couple told CBC. Though they're still very young, the birds are quite large. But they made it back to their farm with all their windows intact and relatively little mess in the back.

The couple has been raising the critters since May, shortly after they hatched.

"They're a really cool animal," Obermair noted. "They're dumb as snot, but they were all from the same clutch. So they'd grown up as babies together and I wasn't too worried about them getting separated, because they just stick together. The collective noun is a mob of emus."

The birds round out the couple's menagerie of critters on their hobby farm.