Planet Rothschildi

[Tame Emu Guy]

Hey, Ellamumu,

I don't see much difference in the birds' size. It took me forever to figure out that Felicity is a mite smaller than Greedy. Flare is a part of it: Greedy seems always to have a bit of flare happening.

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Patience, Yinepu: dribs and drabs on vocalisation:

a ‘kook’ is a low-key boom – is that so?

Felicity is here, with Noddy. There’s a third bird.

Felicity is uttering boom-ish kooks at about five-second intervals. It’s definitely hostile. (How do I know that?) S.E. is sure that the calls are directed at the foreign bird, not Noddy. F. is physically oriented to the bird she is threatening.

Right afterwards, she was . . . ummm . . . ‘talking to herself,’ just as you’d say a human was grumbling. The grumbling was in quiet ‘kooks.’ [‘How’s their style? these interlopers? Yum! Nice wheat -- I’ll peck them on the head if they’re not careful!’]

S.E.

 

[yinepu]

Patience, Yinepu: dribs and drabs on vocalisation:

a ‘kook’ is a low-key boom – is that so?

Felicity is here, with Noddy. There’s a third bird.

Felicity is uttering boom-ish kooks at about five-second intervals. It’s definitely hostile. (How do I know that?) S.E. is sure that the calls are directed at the foreign bird, not Noddy. F. is physically oriented to the bird she is threatening.

Right afterwards, she was . . . ummm . . . ‘talking to herself,’ just as you’d say a human was grumbling. The grumbling was in quiet ‘kooks.’ [‘How’s their style? these interlopers? Yum! Nice wheat -- I’ll peck them on the head if they’re not careful!’]

S.E.

lol.. it's funny how you can tell their emotion from the tone of their voicings.. I have heard mine grumbling to themselves on occasion (they had much to say in regards to the lawnmower the other day)

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Morning, Yinepu,

don't be shy to ask why. Do you agree that we (think we) can tell emotion from tone?

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Morning, readers!

Let’s call these wild emu ‘conversations’ ‘suites of vocalisations’: at different times, in different situations, the wild emus use different patterns of calls to communicate.

We’ll focus first on ‘suites’ that pet-emu owners are unlikely to hear, or simply never hear, such as the ‘inter-territory’ suite that I’ve heard territory-commanding females exchange with other territory-commanding females in the early morning.

We can identify:

1. The suites of calls that pass among breeding-pairs and other emus as they roam from pasture to pasture, or are just hangin’ out.
2. The night-time calls of the females (and in late winter, the replies of the males).
3. The inter-territory calls.

This morning (with F. and N. happily eating brekkie just out the back), I’ll post a couple of snippets about Type ‘a’ suites:

we audited a first-light suite between a male and a female down on Meadow One. The only two types of calls were (quiet male) ‘gurks’ and (quiet female) ‘kooks.’ The pair (S.E. was locating them by sound: not difficult, as they were close, and it was fabulously quiet) exchanged these calls in pairs – ‘ “kook” “gurk” ‘ – for perhaps five minutes. Then they soundlessly moved out to graze on the pasture hard by their roost.


Fact Number One:
at times – whether there are two birds or twenty – the conversation among them is brisk. At other times, no vocalisations are produced for long periods. S.E. has observed birds that have not uttered a call in forty minutes or more.

[‘Kay, we’re live here in the brackets. S.E. just heard a female call (from F.) that was not Happy Breakfast Time talk. Sure enough, there is a foreign breeding-pair grazing on the far side of the clearing. So, we are auditing wild emu calls while we are explaining wild-emu calls.]

S.E. can u s u a l l y figure out when the birds will vocalise; but he can’t reliably figure out when they won’t. For example, when small groups of unalarmed birds are grazing, they often make no sound for long periods – but they might. Conversely, when emus are involved in conflict over territory or mates, they make plenty of noise.

Here is the second Type ‘a’ snippet for this morning: S.E. is familiar with the pattern of calls that accompanies Felicity’s first three or four visits with a potential consort. Felicity arrives ‘alone.’ S.E. gives her a double ration of sultanas and wheat (and strokes her chest, and tells her how very beautiful she is. It is protocol here to talk to the tame birds). F. eats for a minute. Then she calls, and the male answers, and bolts across an open from one position to another.

(Guys, do you recall that S.E. has posted photos of F. and N. on the ‘gun-barrel drive’ out the front of the front bedroom? Well, the window in that bedroom is a great vantage spot. There are blocks of gums with spaces between. The above was mostly observed from that spot.)

F. calls again. The male moves again. It’s almost as though she has him on a string. More to the point, though, is that this involves a distinct suite of calls. Felicity is clearly ‘instructing’ the male.
S.E. is familiar enough with this suite to be listening for Felicity’s first call, and the male's response. Sometimes not until then does S.E. know that there is a second bird.

[F. and N. were exchanging calls with the female of the interloper pair. Then Noddy – first time ever – ‘gently’ drove the interloper into the bush. Noddy didn't vocalise. Just the two females.]

Last scrap for this morning: ‘idyllic’ grazing: readers, S.E. always likes to have birds grazing in the clearing. Yesterday was sunny and still (quiet). F. and N. spent several hours grazing here. S.E. audited occasional quiet single ‘contact kooks’ from F. Noddy didn’t respond.

Note: overall, females vocalise more than males.

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Brief Report:

if you ignore the calendar (which is out of sync with nature . . . ), it’s now early winter. We have had rain. Feed is plentiful. Birds are on the move.

Here below is a photo of the sort of environment that S.E. sees wild birds in when he is on the way to town. There’s a long strip – about fifteen miles, of which our old observation area was a part – that consists of blue-gum plantations between the National Park ‘down the back,’ and the highway ‘at the front.’ Right at the front of the plantations, by the highway, are strips of open ground. Because they get more rain and sun than sheltered spots, the fresh pick comes up faster on these spots. Hence, S.E. sees birds grazing there:







Yesterday, S.E. was on the track that runs to Oudman’s. It’s a soak (note the standing dead trees), and has this flowering bush and a fabulous flower that S.E. will try to photograph:







‘Kay, Alpha Chick seems to have slipped out of orbit. M.F. and A. seem to be turning up less often – let’s keep an eye on this.

What’s central, readers, is that it really does seem a little quieter here at this point than it was at this time last year. Felicity and Noddy are not, as might be expected, ‘holding down’ the house-clearing against all comers. They come and go, and wild birds regularly pass unmolested through the clearing, and graze, and forage under the lilly pilly tree.

S.E. went to town at dawn the other day, and, for the first time this season, heard emus at different points around him calling at first light. This dynamic will increase until, in late winter, an observer (not me any more!!) who moved across a couple of miles of bush in the two hours before dawn would (if she didn’t drop dead from the cold) hear perhaps eight or ten male-female conversations, at around quarter-mile intervals, all around her as she moved. S.E. thinks that these are the last-ditch efforts by unattached males to get into the game. S.E. also notes that this is one of the realities that makes this project worthwhile: pet-emu owners don’t have a big enough ‘emu dynamic’ around them to produce such calls.

(S.E. read a snippet about how captive ostriches divide their pasture into territories, and spend their nights nesting on their own turfs. Yes!! This follows the emu pattern!)

We can look forward to observing matings from now on; and S.E. may be retired, but he couldn’t resist trying to figure out where Noddy’s nest is if he incubates here – Audacious’s too, if that happens.

In closing, a more formal expression of the situation:

the house-clearing is 'semi-commanded' by a five-year-old rothschildi female and her first consort. This female has not bred. There are wild birds about, but not obviously in fierce competition for the lilly pillies and good grazing here. The female is an alpha bird – but only just. S.E. doubts that she could maintain control here if a more powerful female (like her sister Greedy) turned up. S.E. would have expected this pair to be here more often, clearly ‘staking out’ their territory. Indeed, it is not even yet certain that the pair is oriented to this pasture. It may be that F. and N. come for a feed, but are based elsewhere.

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

You are in luck, Yinepu!

The quietest of calls lets you know that emus are in da house. S.E. slunk out to the corner of the house (by the lilly pilly).

Six birds: a wild pair over by the old sheep-loading ramp (even now, readers, the grass is lusher there; and the birds seek it out). A second wild pair half out of sight nearby. Then, arriving minutes later, Felicity and Noddy.

Really still air, and cold, which makes for great auditing. For the first time, S.E. was able to identify three registers of the female call:
one: Felicity uttered (with some ruff) some booms as she quietly advanced on one pair.

[Meanwhile – this post is about calls – the male of the other pair walked right up to the lilly pilly, no more than twenty feet away. Minutes later, the same bird came to within about sixteen feet.

two: the female in the pair that withdrew responded to Felicity. However, S.E. clearly heard that she uttered a ‘kook,’ the downmarket model of a boom.

three: S.E. gonna listen for more of these: heard a call that was a low-key kook. It was sooooo close to being a male’s grunt that only the fact that I was paying attention allowed me to distinguish it.

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Wheeeeee!!

[S.E. going to town. Up early. Autumn air is okay on my eyes.]

The Yinepu Project continues:

auditing began at firstfirstfirst light. At least six birds audible, at three points of the compass. Heard the second of these ‘getting out of bed’ conversations. The kooks and guuurks seem ‘standard,’ but S.E. had not twigged to the fact of them.

Wait a second:

the One-Year Project is done, readers; and S.E. is ‘treading water’ until surgery.

However . . . we have entered a ‘sweet spot’ in which, although the reports will be scrappy and local, this is the second time that we have been observing at this time of year.

Thus, we are seeing (and hearing) many things, in effect, for the first time. We can 'pick up on' things that S.E. failed to see last year.

So, these ‘morning conversations’ were surely evident at this time last year – they were surely evident ten million years ago -- but our energies were directed then at the first observations beyond the borders of my place. (Hi, E.H.! Kathyinmo! Foulman! Farmerboy!)


Here is the post for 18th May last year:

‘Greedy is here. Three wild birds are here. Boy Emu is not here. I don’t understand – but with an hour’s effort, including fifteen minutes lying on the wet ground, I got this picture, from about eight feet. Greedy’s on the left, and the wild bird is on the right. It’s not a picnic-area-sort-of-tame bird. It’s wild.

The three wild birds are startlingly similar. Male or female? I don’t know – I think maybe young males.’
Okay . . . I don’t understand . . .’


The pushy pair that was here at dusk yesterday? Let’s call them ‘Dark n’ Pushy.’

We observed them emerge in single file from the gums (with the male a distance behind the female – or at least, the dominant bird up front. It’s a common configuration). They passed across the clearing, right past S.E., and hooked into the lilly pillies.

Two minutes later, F. and N. emerged from the same spot. Thus, these two pairs roosted last night within a hundred feet of each other -- ??!!

F. and N. had a spazzy dance, the white on their chests visible at sixty yards in the half light.

Since then, a third pair of birds has arrived. Felicity’s kingdom is under direct attack. She can shift Dark and Pushy about three feet. (Gotta check which is the male, which the female.)


‘Kay, suddenly quiet. All interlopers have moved on. Let’s check the haul of photos:





For the first time this year, S.E. knocked lilly pillies down with a pole. Here is Dark – or Pushy – standing there, before I did, thinking, ‘Ummm . . . that one up there looks especially juicy!!’:




There are five birds in the frame here, two beneath the tree. Felicity is still more interested in breakfast then defending her fiefdom:





S.E.

 

[yinepu]

Morning, Yinepu,

don't be shy to ask why. Do you agree that we (think we) can tell emotion from tone?

S.E.

We absolutely can tell emotion from the tone..

just listen to a chick who is happy and content compared to one who is scared

there is a big difference and you can certainly get the feeling of panic in the frightened one's call



thanks for the info on their vocalizations. especially the females low-key 'kook" that sounds like a male's grunt!

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Hey, Yinepu!

Yeh – but I think it’s good to confirm things as we go along. The ‘alarm calls’ come to mind. Just a couple of times, I have literally actually stumbled upon birds in the wild, and there is no mistaking the alarm in the call.

Ya know, ‘from my side,’ it has been like being buried under an avalanche of possible foci. Gee, a couple of seasons ago, for example, we didn’t even know how to find a roost. All along, I wanted to spend a big chunk of time studying the calls.

Equipment would crack the nut. If we had some good recording equipment, we would have no trouble getting high high quality recordings of the whole gamut of calls: the still cool mornings here are the perfect background. It may even be that no one has ever got around to recording the early morning conversations between males and females in late winter.

S.E.