CHICK UNDER WING
‘Kay . . . deep breath (and coffee):
I’ve staggered about the gums in the vicinity of where I found the chick. No more thus far.
Is there such a mental illness as ‘False Peep Syndrome’? ‘Oh!! Over there! A peep! No. Not. Wait! Over there now!’
There is rain coming: the wind is rising, which makes it very hard to audit. While I was on the ‘scrub side’ of the fence – off my place – I did hear a crash in the scrub that didn’t sound like a big roo. The sounds of roos and emus in the bush are sometimes and sometimes not distinguishable. I heard a similar sound close by when I had the chick in my hands in the first place. It would make sense, readers: a wild male with chicks could have passed along the fence-line, and a chick has darted through the fence, and the male couldn’t follow it. I don’t know. I am clutching at straws.
Meanwhile, though, I’ve checked on B.E. and (quick: name the chick, S.E.) Ring-In:
Walt-Disney cute!! The first time I checked, I approached in trepidation, wondering if in fact the chick had been rejected, and left. It is a fine thing that four years of patience means I can approach B.E. to about twenty feet, far far closer than on any previous occasion.
He ignored me. I could hear incessant cheeping. (Notably, the chick made no sound when I first sighted it, and little later; but it was its cheeping a little later that allowed me to track it.) So, kneeling and focussing the binos – bless Mrs Binoculars Manufacturer – I watched. It took me several minutes to figure it out. It looked as though B.E. has sprouted an annexe of feathers. Each cheep produced a tiny movement of the annexe. I couldn’t actually identify any part of the chick, but it was clearly there.
The second time, I approached close again. The annexe (D’uh, Supreme Emu – no, at first it seemed to be in the wrong place) transpired to be B.E.’s wing. B.E. literally had Ring-In under his wing, all snuggled in except for his little speckled head (female, I think), which was poking out.
‘Kay, S.E. has a bunch of stuff to patiently achieve today. Where Ring-In came from must remain a mystery for the moment. In the first moments of the drama, I had to bring Ring-In back to B.E., and was astounded to realise that I couldn’t find B.E. even though I knew he must be within eighty or a hundred feet of where I was standing. I had to go to the end of the aisle, find the landmark, and locate him from it – that is, a nesting emu snuggled down (exhausted) in the leaf litter of a gum aisle is a very very hard thing to find. The area that I’d quarter to find the Unknown Male is several hundred yards square. Gotta leave that project at this second.
Supreme Emu