Mating-Season in Australia

[Raptor65]

Here's a picture of a Sunflower to compare:


The middle picture may not be the true color, since we have no capacity to see ultraviolet it'd only be a guess as to what color a bird would see. But the picture shows what lies in the ultraviolet spectrum, there's a lot we don't get to see. Not only that but Human skin may look smooth and mono-colored to us, but to a bird it takes on an almost metallic appearance with lots of freckles. Bruises which aren't visible to the naked eye also become visible, which may be why Emus occasionally peck at areas of skin which look perfectly clean and normal to us.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

This is impressive, Raptor, just the sort of detail that makes a project like this valuable and interesting.

I heard especially long strings of booms last night/pre-dawn – sixteen! And I thought I heard a bird reply. And Felicity was booming enthusiastically when I got up. I wonder if there are wild birds about.

Do you guys agree that the male parents for about five or six months?

Supreme Emu

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

‘Big’ and ‘little’ notes today. The Project is almost over, readers:

Supreme Emu has retreated to the Winter Bunker. (I can’t run the fire here because of my eye. It makes for long hard winters.) It’s cold and raining, which is good for the farmers and I, but bad for our project.

Felicity has been behaving oddly today, vocalising as though there were wild birds here. Really long strings of booms last night/this morning; and I thought I heard a wild male respond. If she is to mate (and lay) this season, she has a matter of only a day or two to do it – perhaps her vocalising today is a last-ditch Lonely Hearts Bulletin!?


Although we still have the icing on the cake – getting to watch B.E.’s chicks hatch – the project is all but over, readers. It’s only a fortnight until ‘first possible’ hatch-date. It’s now, I suppose, ‘the low point of the emu year’: many males are nesting. The remaining birds don’t seem to be actively courting. (Gee!! Remember the first days of the thread, when we had three and four and five wild birds at a time schmoozing here in the clearing! In the last fortnight, we’ve seen only Mohawk.) There is enough food to preclude the need for the birds to really congregate. (In late summer of a bad year, they do really congregate.)

The Oudman Project has bitten the dust. Remember I mentioned that the front gate was open? Well, the blue-gum companies are bound to clear fire-breaks. They use herbicide. I noticed some oddly yellow grass there the last time I walked over. The penny dropped today: all the grass on the fence-line that I walked just a week ago, and almost a half of the pasture by the house, is now dead. So, perhaps that’s why I have had so little luck with the last couple of observations; and if the birds are smart, they’ll stay away a while.

The tiny white maggot-like things that I see in the blessings, are they parasites? I shall keep examining. At first glance, it seems that some blessings contain a great deal, and some contain none. So far, the blessing of my birds don’t contain them.

Although I have loose ends to tie up, I do have one project still in mind. It will be hard, an all-day-take-sandwiches venture: it would be nice to have even one datum from wild-bird-in-the-wild birds. My Categories could have a ‘5a’ and a ‘5b’: Five is ‘wild bird’; but so far the wild birds we’ve observed have all been on plantations. (Those birds we saw over at Stinky Creek were on a plantation. They probably actually live in the National Park, but they do come to eat the pasture.) Well, a ‘5b’ bird would be a wild bird that lives entirely in the wild.
Remember the photo of the ‘island’ of scrub where a male might nest? Well, the National Park is only about three quarters of a mile due South of it.

[Felicity is standing outside the living-room window, to remind me that some people haven’t been fed.]

Supreme Emu

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

The Last Big Trip
​

Readers, it’s not appropriate to say much about ourselves as individuals here; but I think I can get away this, as I am sure it will interest you in an understanding-the-homeland-of-emus way:

I am a 1960 model, raised in a country town over east. For various reasons, I have been all my life a traveller. Some of the travel was overseas – seven years in Asia – but most of it around Australia, and I do mean around Australia. I once hitched from Sydney to Derby, three thousand miles in six days, clear across Oz, and read Hamlet on the side of the road in the Tanami Desert, where the temperature in places at times reaches well over one hundred and thirty.

In the late 70’s, I served in airborne infantry, and spent long long hours hammering through the night in a Hercules military transport aircraft.

Well, if we had the time and the money and everything else we needed, I’d take you for One Last Adventure, guys. I’d take you to places that no tourist has ever even heard of, let alone been to.

I’d take you to the sub-tropical rain forest on the New South Wales-Queensland border. In 1979, nine other grunts and I managed to machete our way through only 1.2 miles of this stuff between dawn and dusk.

I’d take you from Byron Bay to Brewarrina: you start at a lighthouse on a headland overlooking the Pacific, cross the hinterland, cross the Great Dividing Range, come down across the ‘table lands,’ head out into ‘big wheat country,' then into semi-desert, then into desert desert. There are some bad places on this planet – find the ‘empty quarter’ of the Arabian Peninsula – but nowhere will you find so much hard country in one big chunk.

If you ever get a chance to fly from Denpasar, Indonesia, to Sydney, make sure you get a window seat. The flight – get a map of Oz to look at – crosses the coast at Derby, a sliver of green. It then takes six hours, as straight as a ruler, to cross the continent. For three solid hours, across the centre, it’s red earth, unrelieved by anything. Then the green begins to appear and deepen in colour as you come across N.S.W. In the last half hour, as you descend over the Blue Mountains, you can see the massive granite cliffs of those mountains.

And emus live in a very great deal of it. We can laugh and point at these silly inquisitive life-forms; but you could be perishing anywhere within an area of a couple of million square miles on this continent, and one of those silly featheries could choof on past, alive and well, pecking up specks of nourishment invisible to you, thinking about mating season and next year’s batch of silly little featheries.

Mark Blair

 

[chickenzoo]

Thank you for sharing with us. I know we all have been tuning in. We feel like we are over there too, in a small way.... i hope you can find another emu adventure to take us on when the chicks hatch and the weather gets better. I enjoy learning about the terrian and plants over there....

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

A bird was booming persistently but quietly at dawn. (There was a break in the clouds, and a fine rosy glow in the east for a few minutes.) I assumed it was Felicity. Then Bossy Bird – Greedy hasn’t lost all her moxy – boomed me out of bed . . and Felicity is not here.

Do we suppose that right about now is the ‘low point’ of the emu-observation year? Firstly, if adult males breed every year, then at this second, most males are sitting. Secondly, the abundance of food (though not the most nutritious) means perhaps that birds need to move around a little less; and less movement means fewer visible birds.

I visited B.E. yesterday. Do you think he has a sort of biological timer that tells him when the eggs should hatch? I’ve read some posts about males sitting ‘overtime.’

Ah! Felicity has turned up.

Just to give you an idea, I had one hand on the monitor while I took this photo (through the living-room window) with the other – this is how close I live to the emus!



S.E.

 

[chickenzoo]

I know they can hear the chicks chirping in the eggs. Perhaps oversitting is when the eggs dont develop? I know chicken hens will sit for what seems forever trying to hatch something.
They probably hear them way ahead of what we hear.
My emu seem to vocalize for many reasons.....sometimes it seems for no reason at all. Females will boom at me, around me or too themselves. Males grunt at me or each other... Hiss or half hiss and beak snap. Mine don't beak snap at me.... Only seen the males do it when really POed at each other.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

We're live, guys:

Mohawk, G. and F. are here. Felicity is staring into the bush beyond the clearing. I have never seen her ruff so puffed up! It extends to her knees. I can here a bird just off in the gums, but I am not sure if male or female.

Interestingly -- remember what I wrote about birds being 'on duty'? -- Greedy is paying absolutely no attention.

Forty minutes later: what I just watched is a good example of the difference in our situations. Both your birds and my birds have the same behavioural propensities, but here they can 'play themselves out.' It's much like theatre, except the different acts happen in different places.

Anyway, if you were the bouncer at the door of the Emu Nightclub of Life . . . you wouldn't let Mohawk in. But Felicity must want him here -- she's in charge.

So, Mohawk the Toy Boy does nothing except graze. Greedy does nothing except graze. Felcity postures at the edge of the clearing (facing down toward that strip of bush down the back, the 'staging point' that I mentioned). I could hear the interloper. Felcity moves into the gums. I actually saw the wild bird for a second. All very low key. Occasional quiet booms.

Then F. re-appears. Then -- I am trying to 'translate' what I see -- Felicity made a noise that 'passed the baton' to Greedy.

I don't know how else to explain it. For well over an hour, the wild bird has been down the back, and Greedy had hardly lifted her head from her grazing. Then, as Felicity returned, Greedy raised her ruff a little, and headed off into the bush.

And I expected a fracas; but all I heard only periodic quiet vocalisations. I snuck down through the gums, but couldn't spot either bird.

It's appropriate that I re-iterate just how clumsy my observations are, readers. Praise or sympathy aren't the point. It's just reasonable to note how breathtakingly efficient the birds are. Obviously, when they are vocalising, that's a 'landmark' you have to guide you; but trying to sneak up on them is embarassingly ineffective. Then, worse, if they don't vocalise, you sneak forward until they hear you and run away -- embarassingly ineffective. Or, you can sit and scan and scan the area from which the birds called, until eventually you figure out that they've decamped -- embarassingly ineffective. Or, you can sit and scan and scan until you've figured out that they've decamped, then you move, and realise that they've been right in front of you for a half an hour but you didn't see them, and they run away -- embarassingly ineffective.

So, the 'theatre thing': it's very much like watching a play in a language you don't understand. You can glean some meaning from movements and body posture, but there remains a great deal of gaps to fill; and if you can't/don't get into position when you hear the first calls of the drama, and you can't then stay in position -- deathly still -- for perhaps an hour or two, you can't see even just the act that happens in the clearing, let alone the act that follows down the back.

Saw a new and exquisite bird: brilliant yellow breast, and white and black stripes on its neck and head.

Greedy hasn't come back.

Supreme Emu

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Fabulous Vocalisations!

Morning, everyone. I bestirred myself at first kookaburra call, to see if I could determine which of my birds is vocalising in the early hours – it’s a little hard to pin the direction through the walls of the house. The result was one of the best observations of this whole project.

Okay, both birds are vocalising. I spotted a shape in the almost-darkness. It turned out to be Greedy, just come out of the gums on the Western side. She neither grazed nor vocalised. I heard a good deep boom from the south, and Felicity showed up. Then – it took me a couple of minutes to be sure – I realised that there were two more females audible in the distance, perhaps a mile, really faint, one in the south west, and one to the north. What followed was exquisite. Felicity, while standing about fourteen feet in front of me, as though on a stage, produced the best female-boom vocalisations I’ve ever seen. Her ruff was an inch or more below her knees. I could see her diaphragm moving up and down, and her beak snap open at the second each boom came out. Her performance included a little strut with her beak tucked down on her neck. What remains to be determined is the degree to which one bird is responding to another.

If my post yesterday about ‘plays’ and ‘language’ seems a bit high-flown, you shoulda been here! Clearly enough, this is a mating-season dynamic of some sort. For example, surely it’s not a co-incidence that Greedy didn’t make a single sound (though she was eagle-eyed most of the time).

If we could get a recording of such an episode, we could determine – I heard it at one point – if one bird’s call is an immediate response to another’s. And where are all the males? Recall, readers, that a month ago, when we walked to the river at dawn, three of the four vocalising females attracted male answers.

[Questions – please answer if you can: for how many months do you think the males parent? Are there more females in an emu population than males? Or is it about equal?]

Then, after about a quarter of an hour, both birds started grazing.

Supreme Emu

 

[chickenzoo]

Im afraid i cant answer the male to female ratio question....not hatched enough to have a population ....lol but it seems like i hatched more males.
I can say that at six months...my two chicks are still being parented...even thou i took the eggs after he sat them almost to hatch and raised them to three months before he actually was able to interact with them.