We went adventurin’ yesterday, guys. Don’t even ask.
In the process, we crossed about eighty miles of back roads on the south east side of my district – the non-National Park side.
Of course, we were paying emu-logical attention:
I was basically right about the Category 5a thing, that there aren’t a lot of ‘wild’ emus left, just millions of emus that live in balance with The Facts of It All.
Now, it may be that our observations are haphazard; but they are also, ultimately, close to a sufficient patchwork.. We observe nearby pastures at length; we snip a bit of data here and there at pastures further afield.
But we haven't yet been far from home, geographically speaking, though we got some photos by the road to Dwellingup. Still, there are bits and pieces:
I have recently noted two yearlings, one-year-olds (1.5?), at the same place on the side of the road on the way into town. Are they pets in a field? Or does the equation of fences etc. somehow make them monarchs of a pasture by a dam?
There is a lovely soak pasture that I also see on that road. Four years ago, it would not have made sense to me in the least. Now, I see a summer-time oasis. It’s tiny, perhaps twice the size of a tennis court. However, I see birds there on a regular basis, which tells us that . . . there are birds there . . . (It's right by the road. That must be relevant somehow. Smack by the highway it is.)
Anyway, as we barrelled along dirt back roads, past miles and miles of ‘mixed farms,’ I realised that I had some vague idea of what I was looking at, emu-logically speaking:
it’s a basic pattern repeated many times, readers. The best food is on ‘human pastures,’ but you don’t want your tail feathers chewed by the farmhouse dog, so you quietly gravitate to a section where the dry grass is a species that has good seeds, which you can get to via a ‘crossable’ fence, behind which is a supply of water.
I noted isles of scrub, standing on hilltops in a field of stubble, and thought, ‘I betcha a carton of stout that you’d find roosts in that bit of scrub!’
There may be a sort of ‘map’ in this district in the emus' heads, whereby the birds can move from these districts, if needs be, to more open areas. Emus commonly use tracks to move about. It’s not foolish to imagine a flock-ette that is suffering hunger hitting the road at the front of ‘their’ farm at dusk one night, and trying to wend their way through miles of tracks and fences and farmhouses (dogs) as they try to find ‘open country.’
Or do they just perish? Locked into an insufficiently bountiful ‘emu sub-world’ of the greater agricultural mosaic??
S.E.