Mating-Season in Australia

[Tame Emu Guy]

Morning, readers. Hmmm . . .

firstly, please bombard me with questions and answers. I have no idea what I’m doing here.

Let’s sort of ignore Boy Emu, quietly sitting there on Day Two of sixty days. I checked this morning. The only report that I can possibly make is that (a) he’s there, and (b) his head moves every so often. We don’t even know yet if he has egg(s) under him.

Speaking of eggs, Greedy isn’t here this morning. How interesting! I’ve posted a request for information about the relationships between individual matings and the laying of fertile eggs.

Let’s get tekklikal for a minute. The scenarios are:

One: one mating equals one or several fertilised egg(s). That first egg(s) is very likely to be produced by the female and the ‘primary male.’ Then . . . the female returns to the nest/nesting male, mates again with the primary male on the spot, goes off, and comes back a day or so later, and lays another egg(s) at the nest – literally straight onto the pile! Within this scenario we have the variables of ‘one copulation equals one fertilised egg’ and ‘one copulation equals several fertilised eggs.’

Two: as above, until the first egg is laid and sat upon, then the female goes off and mates with ‘secondary males,’ and returns to the obliging nesting male, and adds eggs to the nest. Note that the variables are the same here as for One above: one c. = one egg, and one c. = several eggs.

Three: a combination of One and Two: the initial mating(s) initiate the hatching-phase, as above. Then, the female mates with both the primary male (necessarily at the nest) and secondary males. etc, etc.


Let’s leave the technical stuff there for this morning.

A Day in The Minds of Various Emus
​

An existentialist skit by Supreme Emu​

Boy Emu (thinks): ‘What was it that William James wrote about a nestful of eggs? ‘ . . . that utterly fascinating and precious and never-to-be-too-much-sat-upon object . . . ‘? My sentiments exactly! Yay, go, me!! Oh look – an insect in front of my nose. Might as well watch it. Not much else going on. I wonder what the guys down at the corridor are doing. Wish I had a Twinkie.’

Greedy Emu (thinks): ‘Okay, so far, so good: got Male Number One tied down. A dab of ChanElMU Number Five behind my ears, and off to beat up on some unoffending females, and mate with their partners. Nice day for it!!’

Felicity Emu (thinks): ‘Say what? I’ve been back two days. That idiot brother-in-law of mine has gone from chasing me manically around the house-clearing, to sitting manically on an egg on the ground up an absolutely-and-entirely featureless aisle of gum trees. My bossy sister has gone -- can’t stay gone too long, as far as I’m concerned. I got yummy wheat and berries for breakfast, and I can graze all day here in the sunshine – and did you see the size of that egg that that girl emu laid on that Youtube clip!! Nah . . . I think I’ll stay a spinster.’

S.E.

 

[RingedTeal]

It is fascinating about the eggs S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Yes, it is, M.L. – but it’ll be more fascinating when we have more data: we don’t yet know there is an egg!

Okay, ‘Greedy Watch’ is underway. Early days yet. But we want to know: is she mating with other males? Is she mating with Boy Emu? Is she laying eggs?
She and Felicity seem to have struck a semi-truce. There was a wild bird in the house-clearing this afternoon, but I had visitors, so I couldn’t observe.

I’ve spent hours and hours down at the corridor, but haven’t even heard wild birds. (A fox almost walked across my toes this afternoon: it walked right into the scope of the binos while I was watching through them. I could even see the pinkness of its tongue. Kookaburras hunting. The colours of robins and kookaburras’ breasts, and a blue crane, and a bronze-wing pigeon less than twenty feet away. A kangaroo lying flat out on the ground in the sunlight – without even its head raised. A zillion frogs.) It really does seem as though Emu Life has slowed to a mating-season crawl.

Supreme Emu

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Greedy-Watch Report: Greedy is here, and so are a pair of wild birds, a breeding pair I think. (and Boy Emu’s head is still there, so we’ll assume the rest of him is there also). I got a really good look at them because they came right up to the lilly pilly tree by the house.
Felicity is her usual reticent self. (F. is no coward. She does her share of confronting foreign emus – but I think she’d rather not. I have seen her go fumph fumph fumph at foreigners, then retreat into the backyard, and stand ‘threateningly’ there.)

I note that I can often only identify a particular bird – and this has been going on since Day One here – by its relationship to another bird. So, for example, when these two wild birds were standing side by side, it was apparent that the female (she boomed) was a little taller and skinnier. Moments later, though, because I had to change my spot, and the birds had separated, it was difficult, even through the binos, to pick the tall from the short. (In this case, the body markings – the female has sort of random patches of white feathers on her neck – enabled distinction.) Again, when all four birds were in close proximity, it struck me that the male wild bird was only a two-year-old: just a little smaller. I had a bird named ‘Orphan Emu’ in orbit here for a year or more. It must have been an orphan simply because it was small and alone. Then, as it grew, it simply blended into the general emu population – how do you spot a grown-up small emu?

The two wild birds are still under the lilly pilly tree, with Felicity. Greedy has left. (‘Lilly pillies’ are a purple berry about the size of a big peanut. Don’t know if the tree is native. Bears profusely for months. The emus love them. I knock a big bunch down every morning with a long pole.)

Supreme Emu

 

[chickenzoo]

I feel like I'm there watching too.......

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Houston, we have eggs!!

Nesting: Day Four:

Okay, be calm, Supreme Emu . . .

‘I snuck up to look at the ‘nest.’ Hmmm . . . nothing discernible.’

That was four days ago. That is, four days ago, there were neither eggs nor a nesting emu where there are now eggs and a nesting emu. I am reading material online, and all I have to say is that academics are not to be relied on. We’ll come back to that. Let’s consider what we know:

There are three or four eggs. So, Greedy has laid an egg a day, and Boy Emu has been sitting for four days.

Okay, when I woke up from my nanna nap this afternoon, I saw Greedy moseying down from up near where B.E. is. I walked up about ten minutes later. B.E. was standing up, fussing around. I sat and observed. He seemed more active – which might be in accord with Greedy just having laid. About five minutes later, he stood up again. I snuck down the next aisle, determined to see how close I could get without really disturbing B.E. Good news, readers! It seems that he is not at all disturbed by having me thirty feet away. I sat down to watch him, then he stood again. So did I, hastily focussing the binos, and got a sweet image of Big Bad B.E. tenderly turning his precious eggs.

We shan’t often go close. I was concerned only to see if there are eggs. We can focus on Greedy, who (if the academic texts are at all accurate, and why would we think they are?) will mate rather fewer times than I thought: she stores sperm, and can lay a number of fertilised eggs in the week-to-a-fortnight following the copulation.

Supreme Emu

 

[chickenzoo]

Humm. I know my female lays an egg every other day....... I wonder if he had some really well hidden or if another emu is laying eggs also?

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Morning, Emu Hugger. Keep wading in. It's what makes the project fun. It's great to see posts each morning.


AMENDMENT:

Emu Hugger’s observation is too well-grounded to be lightly ignored. I’ve been up in the gums, playing detectives with an ‘egg.’ Hmmm . . . if a male bird actually concealed an egg, I might not have seen it, and . . .
if that bird left that (first and only?) egg un-sat-on for a half a day or a day (and could thereby ‘report in’ at feeding time . . .
then yes, the arithmetic would make sense, it would be three eggs in four-plus days.


I am sure enough that there isn’t another bird present. It would have to be sneaking in from the far side of the block of gums, down the aisle, etc.



What I do think is worth mentioning – and now readers may understand why I am such a fusspot about scrounging up detail – is that we BYC people may pat ourselves on the back: the quality of our observations is very high indeed. The text I was reading just last night is . . . nonsense: some emu ‘expert’ in the India exotic-meat industry who lists some Thick Textbooks, but who quite clearly has never sat on his cold toosh out in a paddock studying emus. (‘Emus get up to feed and defecate six to eight times every night.’ 'Emus are a solitary bird.' Really? Really? My favourite, in another text, is 'Emus drink five gallons of water a day.' An emu containing five gallons of water would be lucky to hit a top speed of four miles per hour, let alone forty . . . )

S.E.

 

[kathyinmo]

My pair of emus do not drink that much, for sure. One gallon between the two of them would be the most. I expected them to drink more, too. They don't.

Solitary? No, not mine. Fred follows Wilma everywhere she goes. If he doesn't catch up with her, she goes back and waits for him.

Eat at night? Not mine. They are locked up safely all night - with no food in their coop. They couldn't see it if it was there anyway (in the dark).

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

There are no cars or cats or dogs here. Neither a fridge nor a t.v. I can’t run the farmhouse stove (my eyes), so no sound of wood falling in the grate. The house itself is WW2-era fibro sheeting – you could candle this house: little sound-insulation.

It’s around three in the morning that it gets really quiet. Fabulously quiet. I love it. It’s like an elixir, a tonic.

And at that hour this morning, over ten or fifteen minutes, long slow strings of low-key gluks from Greedy (I think), just a hundred yards or so away in the darkness. Not at all ‘boomy,’ but more as though she’s talking to herself, or dreaming. (You know, I assume, readers, that all mammals dream – platypuses dream. But I don’t think birds do.)

???

Then, at dawn, I curl up in the Supreme Emu coat of cotton and wool, and try to get back to sleep, until I’m almost blasted out of bed by a good big early-morning bossy-sister boom about – I mean literally – ten feet from my head, right on the other side of my bedroom wall.

I will watch Greedy as closely as I can today, to see if we can catch her laying.

Supreme Emu