Happy Birthday to All Emus

[briefvisit]

Like horses (I've unilaterally decided . . . ) all emus have their birthday on the same day. Tomorrow. First day of spring. About the time they hatch in the wild (here).

My 'cheepers' become semi-big tomorrow, and will get extra sultanas

Supreme Emu

 

[Ebarnes-21]

Lol fair enough! Hopefully that doesn't mean my 2 week old babies just turned 1 ... "They grow up so fast?!!"

 

[briefvisit]

Can't believe this has never occurred to me, E.! I'm still working it out, but I have been watching Eric's two orphaned chicks (who hang out with Uno, who doesn't peck them on the head).

The background here is how little we know about when Dad emooz 'divest' the chicks -- give them the boot. We have some data, but it's been scrappy -- since my eyes got really bad.

The point here is that having chicks of this age around is uncommon. And I recently found myself talking to them, saying, 'Well, you are nearly one year old!' Which they are. That's the fun, campers:

in the wild, the chicks hatch plus-minus the first of spring. So Eric's two cheepers -- now looking much more like young adults than chicks (though they still cheep) -- are now '1'.

 

[Ebarnes-21]

Interesting observation on my emu chicks for you ... they don't, and I mean Absolutely Will NOT, defecate in their nest while sleeping. Sure they do it several times a night. But they come out to do it outside the nest. Without even really waking up!

Fascinating ... at night they are in a small boxed off section of floor covered with a newspaper, and their "Nest" is a plastic green grocer's crate on its side, with a slightly darkened bulb for warmth, rag strip "Feathers" hung from the ceiling, and a newspaper "Curtain" over the entrance. Get the picture?

So the "Emu Dunny" is officially that section of newspaper floor just outside the "Front Door" apparently ... the process is quite amusing ... sleepy Emu suddenly reverses out the curtain, leaving his head inside the nest so we have a headless emu sticking out, squats, squirts, and returns to the nest.

In the morning we have lumps of goodness knows what arranged in a neat row 6 inches outside the curtain. The nest (floored with an offcut of carpet) remains clean. I thinkt here has been one accident where a sleeping emu reversed in the wrong direction and hit a wall instead of getting out ... but that was on their first night in that nest they can choose to leave. Given an option, they strongly prefer not to soil their nest.

Now what's with that??? Very smart I would think ... most birds and animals just do it where they sit or stand and it gets a bit messy. Chooks are terrible at it! So is it just an emu chick thing (I can see why an Emu Dad would rather they did it outside the feathers, I totally agree with the poor guy), or is it an adult emu thing as well ... ie, are all those piles of blessings at the roost sites actually deposited a couple of feet away from where the emu sits?

According to the emu farmers we bought the eggs off, on the (Very rare) occasion that a broody Emu has to 'go' while sitting on eggs, he reverses off the nest just the same. He doesn't like to even do that which is why he doesn't eat. Even offered food right at his head, he shows all the signs of hunger but refuses it anyway. So they do have a good sense of sanitation particularly as regarding nests, which I had never anticipated.

I wish people wouldn't say Emu are dumb ... I see every sign of very good intelligence.

 

[briefvisit]

Gonna go over this post carefully. But we are on convergent tracks here: there is a dynamic whereby pooping is undertaken to avoid feather-soiling; yet . . . when you see your first poop circle, E., you will go, 'Wow? They somehow manage to not get up (the circle shows they don't) yet not soil their feathers.'

I had been observing for about seven years before I found and understood poop circles.

Gotta find an old article for you

 

[briefvisit]

file:///C:/Users/Mark/Downloads/938327%20(1).pdf

And somewhere is K. Immelmann's article -- ? K. Immelmann, “The sleep of Emu,” Emu, vol. 60, no. 3, pp. 193– 195, 1960. Flat out: he's wrong. (It's relevant: he claims emus move at night to eat and drink.)

 

[Ebarnes-21]

Could it be a male thing? Obviously not solely a chick thing as the emu farmer observed the same behavior with brooding males. But, both these chicks are male. Could the poop circles all belong to females?

Probably not ... that would be very odd. But it's a thought. Perhaps this will turn out in another 20 days when my next 3 chicks hatch, there are bound to be females and if they don't reverse out to poop then that would be interesting. I'm not expecting that to be the case though.

Maybe it is something they will grow out of, excepting when they are brooding eggs.

 

[Ebarnes-21]

Drogo (chick 1) has now decided he likes snails as well as slugs after all, as long as the big ones are crushed. Slaters are also a good option. Poor Rhaegar doesn't get a look in Drogo eats so fast they're all gone before he even gets to the "Hmm do I like this or should I spit it out?" stage ...

They had a walk today, of course they have been spending all day out in a large (6 metre) run, but today we took them out to the garden and they "Helped" us plant potatoes. That is to say, they ate the slugs out of the manure we were using ... so they had many runs up and down the garden following shovels around, and followed the wheelbarrow to the paddock to collect more manure twice. They follow very well. In fact we had wheelbarrow races Lol ... I think as long as there aren't dangers (protective daddy geese, cows, logging trucks), they can follow me around anywhere quite safely.

I'm sure for instance they'd love to help me check the sheep and lambs ...

 

[briefvisit]

Could it be a male thing? Obviously not solely a chick thing as the emu farmer observed the same behavior with brooding males. But, both these chicks are male. Could the poop circles all belong to females?

Probably not ... that would be very odd. But it's a thought. Perhaps this will turn out in another 20 days when my next 3 chicks hatch, there are bound to be females and if they don't reverse out to poop then that would be interesting. I'm not expecting that to be the case though.

Maybe it is something they will grow out of, excepting when they are brooding eggs.

Morning, E.! Quality of data is pivotal. Fantastically, it seems I am/was the only person doing this -- observing wild emus at length. So, at this point, I am pretty good at judging stuff from no-actual-emus-present data -- there's a whole post on this somewhere. When out observing, one becomes sooooo attuned to data other than sightings. Have seen some partial poop rings. Have one sighting of wild chicks (at dawn) actually breast to breast with Dad in their little circle. Have seen two superlative poop rings. Conclusion: every night, Dad leads the chicks about thirty yards into the bush, and they all spend all night in a breast-to-breast circle. Somehow they poop while in the circle but don't soil their feathers: the poops are spread around the circle, sometimes fifteen or twenty -- the poops are more numerous than the number of chicks. You can make a wild guess at the number of chicks in the clutch. (Guessing the age of the rings is not hard. The composition of the blessings tells you what season they were left.)



You guys gotta come visit. Here is the sort of observations we could to out on. Hours at at time, miles from the farm house: https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/mating-season-in-australia.641934/page-16

For example, I once found a fantastic collection of poops in the semi-open on a ridge: lots of poops. Was a flock all roosting in the same spot?

 

[Ebarnes-21]

Well they've had lots of exercise over the last couple of days ... tuesday was running all over the farm with me meeting the sheep, goats etc ... total of over a kilometre walking, although since they were literally running rings around me they probably got a lot more.

Then we orbited the garden and orchard a few times hunting snails.
I'm going to put comments on the emu eating snail bugs etc, over on the Emu chick nutrition thread so that some other poor sod like me in future searching for information gets it all usefully in the same place. Suffice it to say here that Slugs, Snails, Worms, Slaters, Crickets etc are all "Very Yummy for Emu" indeed ... and convert to a lot of growth!!

Wednesday was very sadly pouring down all day so no walkies ... bored Emu learned to chase little balls ... but today we've been all around the farm again, raced around the paddocks, pruned the grapes (Involving pulling up overgrown rooted shoots and hunting for worms), and then did the orchard again ... but now we're back and have fallen asleep lying flat on the floor. Apparently I wore the Emu out ...