Emu pictures and stories.... post them here

[McPhersonFarm]

I finally convinced DH that Emu can be manageable and tame.

We have the acreage for a few and are putting in the fencing for cows now. Going to add corridors for the birds to have plenty of room to run the whole 5 acres

I am pretty excited, this has been a dream for me for 40 years, since I met my first emu at a farm in northern IN. Now, to find eggs or chicks

Please send any contacts or good, reliable breeders to me by PM, I have been reading and studying for years and am way past ready to make this real.

I'm in FL and have some due, but don't want to ship them! As far as eggs they only really lay until March from what I've read. I have four eggs that are at day 50 right now. 4/4 are viable and dance when I talk to them. I haven't decided 100% whether I'm keeping or selling them. Could someone tell me a good place to learn how to sex them? I'm thinkng mine will hatch closer to 60 days because I incubated at 95.5 the whole time. The article on here said that makes for healthier chicks. I took the last two days reading this entire thread and look forward to being a part of it. Will post pics when my babies hatch!

 

[yinepu]

Quote: oooh. yeah.. can we bring our emus too?

 

[yinepu]

Quote:
you can basically sex them the same as a chick or duckling.. just hakes both hands or two hands and a helper if you have an adult

you can also have them DNA sexed from feathers or from a piece of the egg shell with the membrane attached..
http://zoogendna.com/Sex_Made_Easy__TM_.html

 

[McPhersonFarm]

here is my first baby "tiny" hatched overnight! I'm not sure if I'm keeping him. I read the thread and um scared because we have ALOT of ticks and I don't want to keep him just to lose him. .

. ugh picture won't work will load later!

any input on the tick issue?

 

[1muttsfan]

We could all go visit Tame Emu Guy, at the same time.

Road Trip to Down Under!

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Hi, McPF!!

There are places in Australia where, I understand, farmers search their dogs for ticks every day because the ticks in those areas can kill a dog in 48 hours – but my point here is that they can do that, so the dogs are generally okay.

My tame-wild birds here – South-West Western Australia – carry ticks. Last winter, Greedy became obviously ill at the same time that she had on her the biggest tick I’ve ever seen here. (There are a couple of extra bits to this story, but I will keep it trim.)

The difficulty is precisely that, although I can stroke the neck of these birds as they gobble my largesse, they won’t stand still to be de-ticked. I also wonder if there are substantial numbers of ticks hiding under their feathers. I have only seen ticks on their heads. Several years ago, I killed a snake at the house, and checked it: five feet long, and about twenty ticks tucked under its scales.

So, here are my thoughts/questions?

Are they a big – that is, potentially fatal species -- of tick?

Do they carry diseases that we don’t have here? (It is ‘Lyme disease’? Sounds a shocker. The ticks here are, I think, poisonous as ticks, they don’t carry other diseases . . . I think.)

If you had a number of pet emus in an area of plentiful ticks, that would be both a danger and a real logistical difficulty – all the more so because I advocate Bigger Is Better pens, whereby you have less close physical contact with the birds than some people do with smaller pens do.

If you had just one bird, and that bird was tame enough for you to thoroughly examine it at frequent intervals, well . . . that’s my answer.

I hate ticks with a passion.

Supreme Emu

 

[yinepu]

guinea fowl love to eat ticks.. maybe invest in a small flock of them to patrol the area to help lower the tick population?

 

[yinepu]

Quote:

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Hi, Imuttsfan!!

I remember you. You were a reader of the Mating-Season thread – a year ago now!!

Nothing would make me happier than to have a houseful of emu-lovers. I was thinking about it just today. We would not only have a great time, you guys would learn enough in a week or ten days to put a whole new context on the stewardship of your pet birds. An energetic observer can sink an astounding amount of time into the projects that suggest themselves -- the birds here ‘use space’ in an entirely different manner because they have space. They move miles in a day, from one pasture to another to another. So, you need to cover big distances to get a handle on it.

Highlights might be:

Learning the basic skills of observation – rather harder than you might think. (I mentioned this somewhere else. I’d beg of you to bear instruction in getting around out here. It’s not outright dangerous; but we have an elegant sufficiency – depending on the time of year – of harsh weather and dangerous life-forms. It would be outright remiss of me to send any of you guys out, for example, in mid-summer, without a certain minimum of gear and instruction. We had a couple of days over 105 last summer.)

Observing wild birds without them seeing you.

Observing a clutch of wild chicks.

Taking a ‘cross-country’ walk to the National Park boundary or across the river to Stinky Creek.

Learning to find and interpret such ‘not-an-actual-emu’ stuff as roosts, fence-crossings, tracks at waterholes and elsewhere, pastures, and blessings.

Making rough analyses of where the wild birds are coming from and going to when you see them. This includes considering the pre-historic birds’ movements, which were very different.

Watching the larger ‘power ballets’ that occur when six or eight birds are vying for access to figs. This will involve you hearing, certainly for the first time, larger numbers of birds vocalising over large areas, very often hundreds of yards or more.

Watching a flock move cross-country. (This one is pretty rare.)

Auditing birds at dawn, especially in late winter.

Taking a tame-wild bird for a walk in the bush, and watching her graze. (Wa ha ha . . . this will be Felicity, who will follow you for ten minutes/until she can’t stomach more wheat, then wander off. When she was a yearling, she’d follow you for miles through the bush.)

Figuring out the ‘vigilance network’ of other life-forms that the emus are plugged into. You won’t ‘get the drop’ on many emus until you learn to keep an eye out for kangaroos and kookaburras and cockatoos.


I personally look forward to filling the great gaps in my knowledge, things like mating, incubation, and care of chicks.

S.E.

 

[1muttsfan]

It is amazing what you can learn from just sitting and watching. I can see my little chicken flock out the window when they are out of their pen, and have learned so much from them when they do not know I am there. Like what a good rooster does when out with the girls.

Ticks can cause a neurological disorder just from being attached, called tick paralysis. It does not seem to be associated with an infection, but with the tick itself - a toxic or immune reaction to their saliva? It is rare, because many dogs are tick bitten but do not develop disease.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick_paralysis