Planet Rothschildi

[kbgh]

Great to see you got out a bit. Take it easy. Short reports about the house clearing antics are great. (and hopefully, don't overly exert you).

Sounds like the chicks are becoming a bit more mature. Taking on Felicity, guess the gotta learn whose boss somehow.

Later K.B.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Hi, All!! Here are a couple of photos left over from Retirement Day. No Theory. Just a pleasant walk in the sunshine.

The photo above is the edge of the dam that we are sitting at further below. The flowering eucalypt is bottom left. The big guy in the centre is, I think, a red gum, and its nooks and crannies are nesting places for the cockatoos (and possums too).



Felicity and Felix haven’t turned up for two days. Eric Plus weren’t here for brekkie -- !!?


K.B. found the text posted below. We shall pick it to pieces; but there is just so very very little specific material on emus’ diets that it is surely worth posting:

"Emus eat a wide variety of leaves, grasses, fruits, native plants, and insects. In spring and summer, their diet consists mainly of flowers and seeds. In autumn, as those foods become scarce, they graze on young grass which sprouts after summer rains. In winter, herbs form the emu's main food. They eat insects when these are available - such as during grasshopper plagues."

Also

"Emus forage in a diurnal pattern. They eat a variety of native and introduced plant species; the type of plants eaten depends on seasonal availability. They also eat insects, including grasshoppers and crickets, lady birds, soldier and saltbush caterpillars, Bogong and cotton-boll moth larvae and ants. In Western Australia, food preferences have been observed in travelling Emus: they eat seeds from Acacia aneura until it rains, after which they eat fresh grass shoots and caterpillars; in winter they feed on the leaves and pods of Cassia[verification needed]; in spring, they feed on grasshoppers and the fruit of Santalum acuminatum: a sort of quandong. Emus serve as an important agent for the dispersal of large viable seeds, which contributes to floral biodiversity."


Here below is the little dam that I mentioned. It looks a little hot be cause it was; but we were sitting in the shade. You’d have needed an Extra Super Panoramic Vistascope Lens to get all the sky in. Supreme Emu confesses to being a great lover of hot blue Australian sky. Try to imagine that you are in the photo. There’s a rim of trees all around you; but above that, there’s nothing but an infinite vault of hot cloudless blue.

(Up north, where S.E. once worked in the mines, if there’s a cloud in the sky in winter, everyone rushes out to have a look at it. I kid you not: one hundred days of cloudless blue sky.)

So . . .

‘Where are all the emus?’

To reach this dam, guys, you cross Meadows One and Two, then walk almost all the way across The 500; but no sight or sound of wild emus. Not a single fresh blessing seen. The shore of this dam is quite rocky, so it doesn’t take prints well. However, there are emu tracks there.

So (minimalist), there are emus in the area.





Here below is Meadow Two. I’ll meet you on the far side:





S.E. is uncertain whether it is ‘on line’ or ‘off line.’ It looks pretty dry – but there are green plants. But are they Yummy for Emus? Unknown.

However, it’s of note that until recently, S.E. wasn’t looking hard enough. He swept his all-knowing gaze across whole pastures, and incorrectly declared them to be ‘off line.’

This time, he sure did see a hot, seemingly-unYummy pasture; but he got down on his knees. There are tiny green plants. There was a tiny flower. There are (dry) seeds on the (dead) grass. Yumminess is unknown – but this pasture is not nearly as barren as might be thought. Lesson learned! Here is the menu:






Next, a thing that I have been waiting to comment on.

Check the photo below. It’s the fence between my place and The 500. Birds cross here – I’ve seen a clutch of chicks gingerly pick their way across this lying-down barbed wire on their way to a tiny pasture across the track. (S.E. recalls thinking that it was, for the clutch, an early excursion from the nursery to Points Beyond.)

My point here is that sand like this takes tracks well, though they wash out when it rains. A spot like this, where there are large-ish sheets of sand in a ‘likely spot’ – like a length of downed fence – is somewhere you’d always check (and wow, guys, The 500, which is in the background, is unbelievably different from the lush and inviting nursery of spring!!)






Here below is Felicity being invisible to Eric at a distance of fifty feet. S.E. recalls occasions on which Eric would have chased Felicity half way across the county if she’d got this close; but at this point, Eric is content to keep up appearances.




Finally, a recently-discovered Picasso titled ‘Emu Chicks with Wheelbarrow and White Plastic Toilet Brush.’ It’s uncanny how similar this place is to mine, where the wild chicks are now so unwild that they have started walking all the way through the carport.

It isn’t actually a good thing. S.E. is concerned that, if startled, they’d injure themselves; but it’s hard not to enjoy having wild emu chicks visible from your computer keyboard. Part of New Life will be a Big Gardening Project – it’s as good as money in the bank -- and it shall include the making-much-safer-for-emus of the backyard.





S.E.

 

[kbgh]

Whoever wrote the bit on what emu's feed on obviously never observed them in the house clearting. peaches, figs, ect. He made no mention of these types of food. And of course where is the mention of the wheat and sultanas?

Cool pics of the area and the dam. Just plain looks HOT

.

K.B.

 

[yinepu]

Cool pics of the area and the dam. Just plain looks HOT

.

K.B.

Several of the pics look like they could have been taken out my back door.. except the trees there are a bit taller!

 

[Ashburnham]

After 7 weeks of no rain, my place looks pretty much like that too.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Hey, Ashburnham!

Yup, I wonder at this reality, that the pastures can revive so fast. It would be instructive to put a teacup of random dirt under the microscope, and find out just how many seeds are lying there, quietly awaiting their cue.

Have seen just a couple of wild birds drifting about. E.P. are here. Felicity and Felix have decamped. S.E. thinks, seriously, to get a decent feed.

Finally, the guy below has made an appearance here on the planet as a cut-and-paste from the Net; but here he is in his creepy flesh. This specimen was a bit over three feet, but they grow to six feet in places. (The largest member of this family, the komodo, which grows closer to nine feet is native to an island just north of Oz). At five or six feet in length, they’d very likely be capable of attacking very young chicks.

 

[kbgh]

From the appeance it seems to be Varanus giganteus

Perentie

Perentie in the wild
Scientific classification​

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Reptilia
Order: Squamata
Suborder: Lacertilia
Family: Varanidae
Genus: Varanus
Subgenus: Varanus
Species: V. giganteus

Binomial name
Varanus giganteus
(Gray, 1845)

Distribution of the Perentie​

The Perentie (or Perente) (Varanus giganteus)

But look at the red area on the map. It doesn't live in your area Mark. LMAO. But then the written information on Emu is mighty inaccurate, so why should the Internet information on Australian Lizards be any more accurate. Actually he looks more like Lace monitor (Varanus varius) but they are an eastern Australian lizard.

Maybe Ashburnham can shed some light on that.

Let's stick to the Emu S.E.

 

[Ashburnham]

They are quite common around here too.
But a darker colour (camouflage?)
A goanna was the first native creature I saw alive after Black Saturday, calmly climbing a tree
two days after, in a wasteland of ash and black sticks - no idea how it survived, but must have gone underground.

 

[Ashburnham]

Here is our local version-

 

[kbgh]

Cool