‘currently about 21 months’
Bingo! They are just young adults now.
So, this is wild conjecture – it’s impossible to really know – but something like this:
An emu is a young adult about the mid-summer of its second year. You can watch for the very last of its ‘black head’ feathers to disappear from its upper neck.
My theory, though, is that these birds stay sorta ‘in neutral’ until the following year’s breeding-season.
The breeding season starts almost at the same time as last year’s chicks become young adults. And no 20-month-old emu in its right mind is gonna go head to head with older females a week after it loses its last juvenile feathers. This, I note, is my theory: there’s no literature on this. Notably, emu farms record breeding in the second year.
Next: space is the pivotal reality of emoo life. In the wild, the emus interact as chicks and adults and individuals and breeding-pairs and mobs travelling about. It seems to me that EVERYTHING about emu territorial interactions is predicated on somewhere to run away to.
In any enclosed space, however, no matter how large, all these interactions-reliant-on-space are thrown out of whack. If a female, for instance, decides to drive off another emu, she’ll pursue it relentlessly. Just yesterday emu, Limpy Chick (a Dad defending his clutch, rather than an aggressive female) chased a wild emu about two hundred yards.
SE
