After a decade of trying, the British collector and zoologist Walter Rothschild finally managed to obtain two specimens of the Syrian ostrich in 1919, a male and a female. They were captured separately in the so-called “Syrian desert,” lived and died together in captivity in Palestine, and finally transported by a British military plane to his Tring collection, where the male is still kept and from which the female disappeared. With his new purchase, Rothchild was and introduced a new subspecies, Struthio camelus syriacus, to his scientific community in London and around the world. The Syrian ostrich was an animal inhabiting Middle Eastern deserts, including areas that were considered unreachable to Europeans, with fauna and flora nearly unknown to science, and it was highly desirable for these very reasons. The efforts to catch, maintain, and classify it were deeply entangled with the drastically changing political circumstances of the Middle-East in the early 20th century. As this paper demonstrates, scientific work was not only entangled with growing European intervention in the Middle East, but its success relied on existing and expanding, mainly British, military and diplomatic networks in the region. These were entwined with the dramatic militarization of the region, which resulted in the ultimate extinction of the bird. Its extinction then contributed to stabilizing the animal as a subspecies long after the trinomial age.