Mating-Season in Australia

[Tame Emu Guy]

Wild Birds at Coffey’s Swamp
​

I went down to triple-check Peter Parent’s territory. It would be a fine fine thing if we could find him, and get the chicks back. No trace. No luck.

Next, I want to explain a thing: suppose you’re walking down a street that has a lane running off it at right angles. As you get close, you can see just a little of the mouth of the alley; but when you reach the alley, if you stick your head around the corner, you can suddenly see the whole length of it.

Say what? Well, as I move about, I frequently pass from an aisle of gums into an open space, or step from a block of scrub into open space. As I noted above, the scan-and-move mode is hard work. However, if you are coming from an aisle to a large space, it is good value because – being a large space – there’s likely to be something there.

So, this afternoon, after looking around P.P.’s patch, I moved patiently down an aisle of gums to Coffey’s fence-line. I then scan-and-moved patiently to the end of the aisle, schmoozed under a tree, and patiently started scanning. Here’s part of the view:


There are three wild birds in the paddock just visible on the right, and we’re going to observe them. Firstly, we sit stock still until the three birds drift behind the screen of young gums. Then we cross the ratty fence-line. From there, the gums down in the corner of the paddock screen our advance. The birds themselves have patiently grazed out to the centre of the paddock, so they won’t disappear if they are not disturbed. In five minutes, we are here:


After watching until we locate the birds, we patiently schmooze in under the tree. If this all seems a bit melodramatic, bear in mind that the whole plain is covered in grazing birds. If a single one of them sees me, they’ll all bolt. From under the tree, we can see:



You can’t see the birds in the photos, but with the binoculars, the observation is well worth while. There are three birds, one, perhaps a female, a big big beautiful bird of a slightly sandy colour. Two of the birds have a spat, and chase each other about. Even at that distance, I can hear the vocalisations – the first time I’ve ever seen wild birds really fussing.

The third bird, clearly disconcerted, is moving resolutely back and forth along the fence-line. It takes me a while to twig to what it is up to. I think that it is trying to cross the fence in my direction. After five minutes or so, I realise that it is already on my side of the fence, and wants to get back to its companions – but the fence is good quality, and it can’t cross it (Ahh! readers – but it knew to try at length!)

I watch with interest this emu-i.q. test. Eventually, the bird goes about a hundred yards further down, where there is an open gate, passes through it, and doubles back a couple of hundred yards to join its mates.

It’s not important that these birds were a good distance away. I have learned a very great deal in recent months, and one of those things is to just keep adding snippets of info together – rather like overlaying the transparent sheets that I described above.

So? Well, once again, we find wild birds gleefully grazing up to their ankles in water, sending up silver splashes as they chase one another about. Grass grows long and lush in other spots, but the wild birds do seem to like to graze by these swamps*.

[Greedy passed the window in front of Aisle Five and Aisle Seven. I not sure who’s the more disturbed. The two chicks are cheep-cheep-cheeping flat out. Greedy is standing outside – she can clearly hear the chicks – with a look of puzzlement on her face.]

Eventually, I did The Cheeky Thing – moved out into the open. I wanted to see if my guess about which way they’d go was correct: I thought they’d barrel into the island of scrub by the fence, and then cross through the fence back to my place. (Three of the fences in the paddock the emus are in are in good condition. It’s the fourth fence . . . ahem . . . my fence, that’s falling down.), When they saw me, they bolted into the scrub, and I lost them.

Then a very very tired and cold Supreme Emu turned for home, and crossed the fence by this swamp gum. It’s one of my favourites.


Then he was set upon by the Muirs Corellas, which are the only bird in the world that follows you around. If you’re walking through the bush, they’ll move from tree to tree above you while giving you an aural flogging. They do have one charming little vocalisation, but generally they make a truly awful ruckus. Here they are:



There was a lone wild bird standing up the top of the fence-line at this point. It must be a stone-deaf, because the corellas were on top of their form at that point. There was another lone wild bird in the house-clearing as I approached – well well well: a whole month’s supply of lone emus in just twenty minutes.

Supreme Emu

*I would give a great deal to go back in a time machine, and spend a single day observing Category Six birds around here: no fences, no local species yet denuded or rendered extinct, no introduced species, no water other than natural sources, and aboriginal Australians doing clever stuff to attract and spear the birds.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

The chicks, Aisle Five and Aisle Seven, have a permanent home at the Uralla Wildlife Sanctuary. They will be fine, and we can have a report on their progress any time. I am much relieved.

Greedy is here. Felicity is absent still. Boy Emu is e.p.h. 4. Supreme Emu is very tired, but the weather is better.

My farmer-neighbours – people whom I greatly respect – took me to town today. We delivered A.F. and A.S. on the way, which led to a conversation worth relating:

there’s a long-standing dispute in this district about the management of the National Parks. Historically – that is, pre-historically – Australia’s environment was fundamentally shaped by fires. Some was caused naturally; some were lit by aboriginal Australians. These frequent fires profoundly affected the bush: its density, the germination of seeds, and the numbers and movements of many life-forms native to it.

In the last half century or so, though, under a bureaucracy for which no one has much respect, the ‘burns’ have been much reduced.
This came up in conversation because I asked for my neighbours’ opinions about some details of emu life. Their opinion is that the lack of burns has significantly reduced the availability of food in the National Parks simply because burns produce ‘green pick’ for the emus and everything else. So, on the one hand, the emus now come to the human pastures because those pastures provide high quality food, and on the other hand, the emus leave the National Park because there is less food there.

My neighbours were also enthusiastic about our discussion of a ‘reconstructed historical environment.’ It made immediate sense to them. For example, there are old documents – bear in mind that this area of the world was still prehistoric just a century and a half ago – that indicate that the bush was much ‘thinner’ than it is now. You could drive a wagon through it, and pioneers did.
Altogether, we considered fire/food resulting from fire, seasons, dams, swamps, emu-population densities, and migratory patterns.
Our conclusion was that the notion of Categories is not unreasonable. Obviously, the lives of captive emus are very different from those of ‘wild birds’; but beyond that, it seems that the lives of modern ‘wild emus’ – including even of those in the Big Green -- are remarkably different from that of our hypothetical Category Six birds. I have no idea how this relates immediately to your birds, but it will make for interesting and perhaps useful discussions in the future.

Supreme Emu

 

[mbmess2003]

As always great pictures and points you bring up. Glad you were able to relocate the little ones and looking forward to when you post about B E's hatch.

 

[chickenzoo]

Do the wild emu or your tame ones spend any time looking for food on their knees? I know mine will often plop down while grazing and walk around on their knees eating... They also do this when I tell them to lay down and stay.....they keep sneaking closer and closer on their knees....like I won't notice. ..

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Hi, E.H. Not frequently, but yes, I have seen wild birds near the house in Winter (observations of wild birds beyond the house-clearing have only begun with the project) on their knees, indeed, on a couple of occasions, a squadron of them on their knees. Otherwise, Felicity, whom I’ve mentioned, and Eric the Emu, are both likely . . . no so much shuffle about, as drop to their knees to polish off a handful of wheat.

However, E.H., Eric does it as a . . . sort of ‘defensive’ thing. If you put fruit on the ground in front of you, Eric will drop to his knees, fix you with That Look, and shuffle cautiously forward on his knees.

Supreme Emu

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Oh, that cheeky Supreme Emu!
I don’t think any reader has ever seen this – the postures, certainly, the context, no. I've seen nothing of this on Youtube. I've read nothing in any Internet article:



although this rothschildi female is tame, she in enmeshed in the network of wild birds' turfs. She is in these photos engaged in telling the wild female to the South East, in no uncertain terms, that if she pokes her beak in over here, she’ll get a floggin’.



First photo: Greedy has finished brekkie, and she’s alert and ruffed up.

Now examine the two photos below carefully. In the second, Greedy’s head is just a little higher. It actually gets a little higher still, but I can’t capture it with my crappy camera. The very highest ‘mode’ is the Staring Hard that I wrote about yesterday. Make no mistake about it, readers, the atmosphere is electric when she does this: the South East bird booms; and Greedy lifts her head high, and Stares to the South East.










Then she booms.



This process is repeated three or even four times, with both the South East and the North West females.

Supreme Emu

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Wild Chick at Fifty Feet

It’s a long time since I’ve had this much fun, but I’m so tired I’m trembling:

I got myself into a sort of ‘observational checkmate.’ About two and a half hours after leaving the house, I was on my hands and knees in an aisle of gums – patience, guys, background will help:

I’ve explained The Aisle Thing for the very good reason that it’s central to how we sneak up on wild birds. I walked quietly down to the gums short of Coffey’s fence, where we crossed the fence a couple of days ago to observe the birds down at the 'big open swamp paddock.' I scanned-and-moved down an aisle, with the younger gums (with the lush lush grass between them) just across the fence ahead of me, on Coffey’s side. When I was about half way down my aisle, I heard a male uttering the happy-camper sound – guys, it’s a truly truly gorgeous day here today, warm and still and sunny.

However, I’m in a real pickle, observation-wise: the bird I can hear is less than two hundred feet away, and it will likely stay in its aisle rather than come out and cross the fence in my direction. This leaves me two options: sit and wait, or try to move right, so I can look, one by one, down the aisles, which is sure to get me seen.

Firstly, I waited about a half an hour. I could hear wild birds, male and female, vocalising in three different places to my front. (I can at last identify some male calls.) A dozen or fifteen calls altogether. Meanwhile I solved the perspective problem: you can see slivers of the young gums through the screen of the older gums. You need to scan and scan and scan in order to figure out what is near and what is further away. Eventually, you make sense of it, and can see much much more than at first, and anyway, there’s every possibility that there is already a bird that you haven’t spotted standing looking at you.

Next, I started moving on my hands and knees, at about a yard a minute, along the aisle, putting my knuckles and toes on spots of moss. The sun shone; the males kook-kook-kooked quietly on the other side of the fence; and I crawled noiselessly along – until I realised that I was facing a long stretch of litter that I just couldn’t cross without making any noise.

At that point, I was outright exhausted – try kneeling up for three minutes at a time while holding your binos up. Now do it ten times in a row. Five minutes got me to a tree, and I quietly quietly set myself up against it, and settled down in the hope that They Would Come to Me – and they did!

About five minutes later, I heard a chick peep. Somehow, a one-year-old, a chick at the I’m-an-exclamation-point stage, had got through the fence without crossing my line of sight. It came into sight about eighty feet away. I froze: didn’t try to lift the binos; didn’t even move my head to look at it; just watched it out of the corner of my eye. I’d never been this close to a wild bird that hadn’t seen me. I'd never been this close to a wild bird at all.

Then I heard a twang and crash. The parent bird had tried to cross the fence, failed, and fallen back on its toosh. It hadn’t seen me. It was an unforced error. Translating the vocalisations between the two birds – father and adolescent, with the adolescent well out in front – was a no-brainer:

‘Ruprecht! Wait for your father!’ ‘’Yeh yeh, Dad. Okay. Gee, don’t panic.’’ ‘Don’t backchat me, child. You just never know!!’
Meanwhile, the chick was passing me no more than fifty feet away, looking back at its dad.

Never saw me.

Dad had a second go at the fence, made it through, and passed me at the same distance.

Never saw me.

Then I went across the swamp and up the hill, to photograph my place for Emu Hugger. I’ll post the photos later.

Supreme Emu

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Greedy is here. Felicity is back. B.E. is e.p.h. 3. He seems quite bright – could he be hearing peeps at this point?

Felicity is still in charge. Sort of. Just.

Anyone know the word ‘titular’?

Greedy will run in and gobble wheat from the same bowl as Felicity. Felicity tolerates that for a few seconds (in which time Greedy can eat rather a lot of wheat . . . ). Then Felicity puts her head down, and charges at Greedy. Felicity looks . . . well . . . ‘peevish’ is the word that comes to mind. Greedy doesn’t put her head down. She does a fabulous hard right turn, with ruff raised, to avoid Felicity, runs about twenty yards, and then stops and returns to ignoring her.

Supreme Emu

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Readers, Casuarius has posted on another thread a link to a very very very good documentary on cassowaries. Here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjZlm-Cm4iY&feature=related

Apart from being v. v. v. informative about cassowaries, it’s almost equally informative about . . . emus. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

S.E.

 

[chickenzoo]

S.E. ...you should have a video camera.....you could be the next Jane Goodall but with emu...