supreme emu

I figured Sassy bird aka #1 had to be about that age.

How old would Felicity be?

Sound like you've had a brutal dry summer. We had the opposite. 76" of snow this winter and our average is 45-50".

Great to hear from you.

K

hey kb

number one and felicity and greedy hatched in winter 2008. They will be/would have been six in late winter this year.

Yeh pretty hard summer

the kangaroos ate the leaves of the eggplant plant then the eggplants themselves then the capsicums then the cucumber plant then the chives then started on the spiky leaves of the zucchini

se

First shoots of autumn 'fresh picks.' Six emus here at one point yesterday, one a yearling.

A beautiful dark breeding-pair walked right past the window. Not Spot and Spottina.

Sassybird holding the fig tree. Felicity still absent.

SE

I love reading about your wild birds, their lives are a whole lot different than my silly emu sons laying about in their plastic kiddie pool and jumping on their stuffed toys lol

Oh, Ella! If you only knew how silly and frustrated that we got so far into the project, but I had to give it up!!

Observations just aren't gonna happen, but any time the air is cool I can get five minutes at dawn and dusk.

Sassybird was away this afternoon and yesterday afternoon. But this morning the wild birds were leaning on her dream -- I distinctly saw one bird zipping in on the east side of the fig tree while Sassybird was driving a female off on the west side.

Have some really good footage of Sassybird --- including vocalisations -- on my smartphone; but I am having trouble uploading them.

Best of all: at dusk today there was a truly fine 'foreign' breeding-pair in the clearing. Now, the wild birds are always scruffy looking -- it goes with the territory -- but these two were big, dark, and had that lovely 'sharp' delineation of feathers and skin on their necks: the dark, the white, the blue skin.

Really fine bird. Ella, this is The Time of Year: at least seventy percent of the time you can walk into the backyard and there will be wild birds at the fig tree -- six at one time yesterday: Sassybird, Shadow, Spot and Spottina, and two others.

SE

Ellamumu!

I feel like writing, so I shall:

thought last night about pets versus wild birds (with the windows open, and a wild female calling to the west, and a 'roo barking, and cool autumn-scented earth-smells drifting in):

I have never hugged an emu. I would like to hug an emu: big feathery sillies

I have never held a chick that wasn't hysterical with fear. I would like to.

And watch them playing with their toys, and lolling in the pool . . .

. . . there's a place mentioned in autumn 2012, where the wild horses are. There's a dam, Ella, with a little tree. You snuggle in under the tree, with your binos, and wait to 'become embedded.'

The observation area is about 500 yards long -- but there's a thing here that I realise I have never explained to readers. The highway, with a fenceline, is only about two hundred yards behind you.

However, for what reason I do not know, this property has few 'internal fences'; and the perimeter fences of this property -- well over 3000 acres -- are down in many places. (That's why the wild horses are there!)

Now, the observation area to our front is just the close one. To the west lies an open area -- a pasture -- at least a half a mile across.

(We have been there, guys: it's in the post with the pictures of the big dam that we got to by crossing the swamp by the river. KB can show you on a map. He did good research on the water in this area.)

To the south west you can see even further, at least a thousand yards -- and I have watched wild birds coming in from that far out.

Now we 'zoom out' a bit further:

from under the tree at the dam, looking to the south and south west, Ella, you're looking at an almost entirely open area of at least hundreds of thousands of acres of emu territory. If a bird steps quietly out of the scrub to graze (sometimes next to the wild horses and thirty or forty kangaroos and a breathtaking abundance of other bird life), well, that bird could turn on its heel and graze across country, to the south and south west, for a month without seeing or hearing a human.

[The big dark breeding-pair are here, and Sassybird has been away since yesterday. She may be looking for a mate. It's the first time in six years that no member of Felicity's family has not commanded the clearing at this time.]

So . . . the captive birds? I would love to hug an emu. I would love to feed and photograph the chicks . . . but if you could sit under the tree by the dam, you'd understand . . .

SE

Now that post is more like the ones that the old SE posted.

Great to see such a post Mark.

Hope you are a lil better. I enjoy visiting SW Oz thru your posts. Gives me a great perspective of the lay of the land.

Thanks Mark.

KB

The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak!

Hey KB.

Sassybird is here. Two wild birds.

We need an observer to pop over.

Saw the lovely glossy pair at the 'soak' on the way to town last week.

SE

Misty autumn morning:

my neighbour comes for tea. We were sitting in the garden. He is half deaf; I am half blind; we make a good team.
Heard a male behind the fig tree. Then Sassybird went into Full Flare.
A male with seven magnificent chicks came quietly from the gums behind the fig tree -- about 200 feet from our seats.
The chicks' bottom halvves -- salt and pepper -- are so very well camouflaged; but their heads and necks are jet black. They looked like disembodied black heads drifting through the gums.
So: it is a datum: these chicks are just under a year. The breeding-pair-formation part of the year is well underway. It seems that this male will remain with his clutch -- or, if he is to abandon them in order to mate this season, he will do so any second now.
The chicks were about three-feet high.

Whee!! There have been at least a dozen birds here this morning. Shadow was here earlier. Then the chicks were here. Then a spunky dark little bird, notieceably smaller than Sassybird, worked her way through the Sassycordon to the lilly pilly tree. Sassybird is now holding a breeding-pair at bay down behind the fig.

At least fourteen birds at this point: Spot and Spottina are hitting the cordon hard. Sassybird is charging them; they are 'retreating'; but not really away, just around in a circle back into the clearing.

se