2022/2023 Emu Hatch-a-Long

[servpolice]

So last night we had intense rain and a bit of the nest was flooded that Vladimir is brooding on now. I dug a little drain-way so it doesn't happen again. The flood wasn't that bad but the bottom of the nest was a bit wet though the eggs were mostly dry. Will the eggs be okay?

Vladimir kept standing up picking up leaves and branches around the nest and kept sitting down on the eggs again. I felt the eggs and they weren't ice cold but not warm either. He's been on the eggs for 2 days now so I'm sure the embryos have started forming. Is it a worry or should the eggs be fine?

 

[servpolice]

On the bright side, my second male is beginning to sit on his eggs! I think he has 6 eggs.

 

[briefvisit]

'Vladimir kept standing up picking up leaves and branches around the nest and kept sitting down on the eggs again.'

This is what we observed in the wild emu whose incubation we monitored. I recall that the stand-up-turn-around thing happened maybe -- a half a dozen times a day?
I really like the playing-with-sticks-and-leaves thing: Vladimir the Homemaker

'Will the eggs be okay?'
The male gets a good store of fat worked up before he sits to incubate. With his plumage as a curtain around him, he is an amazingly efficient mechanism for keeping a tiny patch of the cold cold world warm so his eggs can incubate.

Supreme Emu

[Six emus here at dawn. The three females in residence. And their brother, who went bush a year ago, has returned with a prospective consort -- so that is very exciting. And the chick (about a metre tall) that has figured out how to sneak in for plums when the coast is clear -- and even get a bit of wheat.]

 

[servpolice]

It was almost every 15 minutes he would stand up and pick every leaf, branch in the nest radius to put in his nest, and I think it was due to the nest being a bit wet but both males are now properly set and aren't moving so that's a good sign. Both females laid an egg each in their partner's nest after the males got broody and I haven't seen any new eggs being added, so both females are being moved back to the main field tomorrow to leave the males do their job.

We have snow coming Monday night and Tuesday with -4 degrees celsius on top of that, so I hope the eggs will stay safe and warm under the males!

I do wonder why emus lay and brood at the worst time of the year

 

[Sneakyturtle]

I’m thinking about getting a gqf 1502. For those of you who have one, do you all have to turn the emu eggs manually at all?

 

[briefvisit]

'I do wonder why emus lay and brood at the worst time of the year '

Here's my guess on this one:

the amount and quality of available food varies enormously in the Australian bush, sp.

Dad's clutch emerges on about the first day of spring. This means that the chicks come out of the starting gate of the season-and-a-half period of abundant food.

Years ago, we spent three months trailing around behind Alpha Chick and Omega Chick here in the house-clearing, watching them through binoculars at a range of only about twenty feet. What we learned is that 'Emus eat grass' is wonderfully wrong. From dawn to dusk, they move through giant-food world, voraciously beheading hundreds of plants. That is, they tax whatever the nutritious bit of the plant is: seeds, berries, flowers.

Conversely, I've seen groups of wild birds down on their hocks in mid-winter, ingesting endless amounts of almost the only food available in mid-winter: grass.

And mid-summer til the autumn rains? It looks like this:

 

[briefvisit]

So, by incubating in winter, Dad puts his chicks in the box seat to eat well in those first four developmentally-crucial months. Here are Alpha and Omega:

 

[Sneakyturtle]

What is the earliest anyone on this thread has had an emu lay an egg? My adult emus are only 13-14 months old, but it looks like they have started trying to mate… is there a chance the female will have eggs this year?

 

[briefvisit]

‘The literature,’ dl, mentions emus on emu farms mating at around 18 months. Now, that’s just when they become mature. They start vocalizing at 14-16 months; lose their very last pin feathers – their ‘black head’ feathers – and get their nice ‘neck ring’ of white feathers.

My theory is that wild emus (my rothschildis) are not socially mature until their third or fourth year, and my point in mentioning that is that perhaps in captivity the full social-development phase is short-circuited.

Supreme Emu, Lake Muir, Western Australia

 

[Pyxis]

I’m thinking about getting a gqf 1502. For those of you who have one, do you all have to turn the emu eggs manually at all?

I turn mine over 190 degrees once a day, but I'm not sure you really 'have' to - I just like to do it because I feel like it's better for the eggs.