I nominate this for Post of the Month. 
My bet is on sandhill cranes. I’ve seen them in unexpected places around Madison for years. Maybe they were molting or something to account for the darker coloration.
StG
Moa?
(Two problems with that hypothesis: a) It’s extinct and b) It lived in New Zealand).
I’m grasping at straws.
My guess…Great Blue Heron…
You’d have to be blind to think a Great Blue Heron was black - if that’s it, turn in your driver’s license!
This article from a few years ago in the Rock Hill Herald about an escaped emu is one of the funniest things I have ever seen in a newspaper.
“Get him!” screamed Ginger Strong in her bed slippers.
“Get a rope!” howled animal rescuer Sheila Dover.
“Get this rope around his neck!” screamed out Billy Grayson, who sure enough had a rope around his neck for just that purpose.
Many people know me as a pretty serious birdwatcher so i often get requests to identify things they have seen. It is amazing how far off they usually are on color, size, bill shape, etc. and i have great fun trying to figure out what it was. When i show them the bird they are shocked at how far off they are. Either that or they eliminate every possibility b/c they have an idea in their head which is wrong.
That being said, your bird Boyo Jim sounds *exactly *like an Ostrich. Right size, colors, shape, etc. So i’d say you got the description spot on. Ostriches are farmed in many places. I havent seen you explicitly reject Ostrich so perhaps you should take another look.
http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/birds/ostrich/
I rejected ostrich in post #8. The legs were stick-like, like a so many wading birds.
As a serious birder, can you tell me something about molting. Like in particular, do any long-necked long-legged water birds periodically lose their feathers on their necks and heads?
Also, do their colors ever seasonally change?
How about an ostrich with polio?
Yeah, i’d support Ostrich with polio. Like i said, it is very hard to get all the details right, even for people who have lots of experience with birds. Something relatively minor like the size of the legs may be off especially since they were in shade. The sharp beak doesnt fit though.
I don’t know any long legged waders that are black with white bits in the tail and none have bare necks, even during molt. Colors may change gray/blue to white and back in some species but none have an all black phase.
I am sad that more newspaper articles aren’t written by that fantastic journalist! Or better yet, that reporters the world over don’t pick up some style tips.
And 6’ tall… I’ve seen plenty of Sandhills (try Cherokee Marsh) and while they’re tall, they’re not any 6’. Maybe 4’ at the outside! More like 3’ to 3.5’.
We’re they eating hoop snakes?
I’ll bet a dollar you saw Sandhill Cranes in light conditions that made you misperceive the plumage colors.
The governor?
I refused to believe that Boyo Jim wouldn’t recognize an ostrich on sight. It’d be like not recognizing a zebra in the wild.
I guess “in the wild” is a pretty vague term, but in the city of Madison (some 21K miles, 34K kilometres distant from the Ostrich’s habitat) I think the saying, “when you hear hoofbeats think horses, not zebras” might be apropos.
Sounds better than a warped and frustrated old bird…
My boss and I were at a client’s home a couple of days ago and saw a small (chickadee size?) bird seeming to hang out by us in a tree. It was a solid iridescent medium blue with a small white slash on it’s side (I think). Five minutes later, we were in the back yard a few hundred feet away and it showed up by us again, seeming to want to be near us.
Sorry for the hijack but I’ve tried several times to identify it with no luck and just saw your post. This is on the north shore of Long Island NY where I frequently see Blue Herons, Egrets and even a Bald Eagle a few years ago.
It was probably Big Bird himself, menacing the good people of Wisconsin. But don’t worry, Mitt Romney is on the job.