Planet Rothschildi

[Tame Emu Guy]

Good but different observations this afternoon:

guys, we are going to wander haphazardly over the ‘back half’ of my block – the side away from Oudman’s and The 500. We managed a respectable distance today . . . and we’ll spend tomorrow pulling burrs from socks and shoes and trousers, and head out again the following day.

As I see more of what I am looking at, my idea of how to gauge the emu density of a place is improving. The ‘back half’ of my place is, I begin to understand, an emu desert. I started looking down at the corridor. No emus; no blessings.
Why? Well . . . how about because the type of grass there has no seeds? Here at the house-clearing, the grass is dead – but there is a head of seeds to be had on the top of every stalk. Not so down the back!! So, starvation scrub, dead-dry blocks of gums, and a few tiny ‘pastures’ of seed-less grass. No blessings visible. No tracks at the two dams I checked.

Meanwhile, though, the kangaroos are doing okay. I suppose that their teeth allow them to grind nutrition from dry grass that is useless to the birds. I saw a group of nineteen roos on a tiny ‘soak.’ A soak is a low-lying spot where the grass dies last. Fifteen of the ‘roos were crowded into a patch a half the size of a tennis court, where the last bits of palatable green were.

I checked the swamp. The water is still knee-deep in places. Interestingly, there’s a tiny but quite good pasture under the trees on the edge of the swamp. Kangaroos are evident there, but not emus.

And to really prove the point, this afternoon, I fed Eric Plus just a little late, and all three of them broke into a jog when they saw me appear with the wheat tin!

Supreme Emu

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Strange Goings-On at the Farmhouse:

[with Cooper’s extra stout beer and Style Council – boss horns!!]

‘Kay, I now have miniature dinosaurs audaciously wandering into the carport. Greedy is more than four years old, and she doesn’t come into the carport.

Got miniature dinosaurs marauding in the garden . . . well, okay, not exactly ‘marauding.’ How does an eighteen-inch-high life form ‘maraud’?

But the point of it all is Felicity:

She definitely has a consort! (Note to self: name consort.) I’ve seen him four or five times, but wanted to wait until I was sure. He’s a lovely big bird, quite ‘beamy,’ with a nice white ‘collar.’ But he’s very shy.

Felicity Plus is clearly based somewhere to the east (over on Coffey’s side, near the Top Corner). She turns up from that direction.

All was madness at about six a.m. Supreme Emu rolled out of bed, hastily donned a mish-mash of clothes and equipment, and rushed out to observe. Here’s what happened:

Eric Plus are ‘pinned down’ by a double issue of wheat just in front of the farmhouse. Supreme Emu is walking from gum aisle to gum aisle, trying to keep up with Felicity and Consort. Felicity is stuck between knowing that I have wheat for her, and the shyness of Consort, and the aggression of Eric Plus. Consort slips across to the next aisle each time he sees me; then charges wildly across my line of vision, to the block of gums on the other side of the electricity right-of-way, to avoid my gaze.

Felicity gets a pat and a nice feed of wheat – but Eric Plus are now gorged, and begin making short aggressive forays into the gums, in Felicity’s direction.
[This they do without vocalisation, with the chicks – one at least – leading the way.]

Then . . . Felicity begins to vocalise and withdraw away from Consort. S.E. is still slipping from aisle to aisle, trying to understand what’s going on. (I thought perhaps there were more emus in Felicity’s ‘mob’ still in the same block of gums as she was, but no.)

Then . . . quite clearly in response to F.’s calls, Consort Emu charges wildly back across my line of vision, in order to join her. They then began retreating to the east.
Now, any other half dozen humans on this planet would think that it’s mad to say, ‘It was heartrending to see . . ’
But it was: Felicity has never been so hard up. But she has a lovely big consort! Yay, go Felicity!!! And why does she insist on vocalising??: ‘Woo ooh!! Here I am!! Come and beat me up!!’

Anyway, I followed her a hundred yards, to the next block of gums, and gave her a pocketful of wheat and sultanas. She wolfed the sultanas, and then withdrew east with Consort.

Shall we stop feeding Eric Plus?

S.E.

 

[kbgh]

You quit feedin them and they won't luv u anymore. I wouldn't quit.

 

[kbgh]

Consort = SHY GUY

Are you trying to turn away Eric plus? If so stop feeding, if not just cut back a bit and see what happens. Could get some interesting observations if you cut back.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Hi, K.B. Thank you for weighing in. The bottom line is this:

S.E. innocently fed the emus that came to the house. What has resulted is a high density of birds, ‘pivotal’ upon both the extra food in the house-clearing, and the wheat that I provide. I tamed several of those emus. They are imprinted on the house-clearing. It is their home.

However . . . we are now close to an overcrowding that is/will cause an exacerbated, a ‘pumped up,’ degree of natural competition – these birds will kill each other for access to the clearing.
Things were not too far out of balance when Eric turned up with this clutch. However, if Alpha and Omega grow up to be well-fed and powerful birds, it will be on for young and old: Greedy, Greedy’s consort; Felicity, Felicity’s consort; Eric and Mrs. Eric; Alpha and Omega.

S.E.

P.s.: I suspect that reducing the wheat won’t help. It’s all or nothing – choke off Eric Plus.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

See Supreme Emu, with his pockets stuffed with wheat and sultanas and ammunition and revolutionary pamphlets – no, wait! just wheat and sultanas – running the blockade of Evil Eric and The Knee-High Bad Guys, to deliver food and affection to the Good Emu shivering in the rain in the gum trees on the edge of the house-clearing.

It’s getting a bit like that, though.

And I have misapprehended a basic reality:

rain like this, guys – early summer – doesn’t spark the growth of good ‘fresh pick’; and it seems that Eric and the Knee-highs are . . . well, not hungry . . . but clearly working harder.

It’s easy to see now that the patch of green grass surviving in the shade of each fruit tree here is an important source of food. It’s the very first place Eric Plus graze each morning – and here perhaps is an insight into why they are defending their primary turf so passionately. In other times, there was so much grass here that birds could graze at length without even being in sight of one another. Presently, though, that’s just not an option.

(I betcha, readers, that next full moon or the full moon after, I see kangaroos grazing on the little patch of green that grows by the septic in the backyard. What goes ‘Hop hop hop twang thump’?? A midnight kangaroo falling over the back fence.)

So, I am making connections between the shortage of good pasture that I noted on my walk yesterday, and the pasture here, and Eric Plus’s aggression, and even the birds I saw travelling through the scrub the other day – yeh okay: they may well be travelling much further than I guessed to get any decent grass.

Supreme Softy

 

[Calla]

Supreme Emu, with his pockets stuffed with wheat and sultanas ?

How big are your pockets ? lol maybe not big enough. lol
Would love to see, how they raid your pockets in search for wheat ! lol


Calla

 

[dak]

See Supreme Emu, with his pockets stuffed with wheat and sultanas and ammunition and revolutionary pamphlets – no, wait! just wheat and sultanas – running the blockade of Evil Eric and The Knee-High Bad Guys, to deliver food and affection to the Good Emu shivering in the rain in the gum trees on the edge of the house-clearing.

It’s getting a bit like that, though.


(I betcha, readers, that next full moon or the full moon after, I see kangaroos grazing on the little patch of green that grows by the septic in the backyard. What goes ‘Hop hop hop twang thump’?? A midnight kangaroo falling over the back fence.)


Supreme Softy

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Unique Observation:

The 500 just never disappoints:

you may recall my notion that a parenting male will generally stand its ground against a threat while the chicks bolt. Well, coming up to the first row of gums at The 500, I saw ‘the usual’: a male standing tall, and chicks (6 or 7? – a big clutch) scurrying off.

But this male – with ‘maximum halo’ of feathers raised – not only stood his ground, he advanced on me. He did so for fifteen or twenty paces, which required skirting a fallen log, and he ended up standing on a tiny spot of high ground.

Well . . . the part of my brain that went to college said, ‘Gee, yeh – that’s interesting.’ The part of my brain related to bonking mastodons on the skull with a stone axe went, ‘Whoa!!! He’s gonna come over here and end me!!’

Gotta say, though, that he looked magnificent, just like a posed photo: a big bird, standing tall and resolutely still, on a spot of high ground, every appropriate feather raised, looking me square in the eye -- then gone . . .


It will take me days to digest today’s data. As usual, I have bitten off much more than I can chew: my brief survey of pastures and dams is gonna take several more trips (and I’m keen to get across the river again, to Stinky Creek). I even found a chunk of bush I’ve never crossed -- ??

Supreme Emu

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Eric Plus have hardly moved away from the fruit trees all day today; but just a month ago, they were touring around on a daily basis.

Something Different:

think back, readers, on the footage you’ve seen of baby kangaroos diving into mum’s pouch. Well, when mum is in a hurry, she leaves with the joey upside down, with its legs sticking out of the pouch.
Today I saw a female roo lying on the grass – quite close. Got a good look at it through the binos. Well! She had the biggest joey in her pouch that I’ve ever seen in a pouch. She had a bulge as large as a pregnant woman’s between her legs; and . . . for whatever reason . . . the joey was upside down, with its legs stickin’ out like the crispy bits on the end of a prawn cutlet.


‘good pasture’ – clearly being grazed on by emus.
‘bad pasture’ – clearly not being grazed on by emus.
‘soak pasture’ – a pasture that is a soak, a low-lying area (peripheral to the Original Swamp, in some cases here).


Meadow One – nuh! Emus don’t like it. Gotta work out why.
Meadow Two – emus love it. Gotta work out why.

The 500 – emu paradise. Why? Hmmm . . . first wild guess: it’s big; it has good water; it offers a great balance of concealment and vision – and give me some time to learn more about the grazing there.
The point here is that we have passed, in recent months, from an emu-food environment characterised by an almost ‘blanket presence’ of food (grass), to a rapidly dwindling number of less and less palatable pastures.

The whole northern section of ‘my place’:

boy, I sure have come a long way since I began really focussing on the emu stuff around me! At this moment, guys, I doubt if there is a single emu on the ‘back’ of the block. The corridor is perhaps the dividing line; the birds don’t much like the pasture there.
That’s where I went yesterday, down the back. My trip there was intentionally aimless. I arced quite a long way, from the corridor, through the bush, and back to the house via the swamp.

There is not a blade of grass in the actual blue gums. There are large blocks of scrub – acres and acres and acres -- elsewhere that also haven’t a skerrick of food either.

And that’s about it: it’s all blue gums or starvation scrub. (I will return after the weather has been fine for a week, to check for tracks at the dams.)

I begin to see the distinction between what is Yummy – or even just sufficient – and what is just green. For example, the electricity right-of-way has become suddenly green with this recent rain; but it’s all weeds.

Perhaps the biggest distinction is between types of dead grass that have clusters of seeds at the top, and . . . dead grass. Some droppings are forty percent seed. I can now guess, when I see a patch of dead grass without large seeds, that that area won’t be strewn with blessings (though in a couple of notable cases, this same grass is quite clearly Yummy for kangaroos! It’s littered with roo poo!!).

There is a mini-pasture deep in The 500. When you first see it, you think, ‘Ah!! A little bit of emu paradise!’ – but the emus don’t think so. There’s hardly a blessing on the whole thing. Yet just a hundred yards away, back in the aisles of blue gums, there are plentiful blessings. It must be the range of plants.



Big Analysis of Blessings:

Supreme Emu examined a lot of blessings today, and learned a lot. Some birds are now eating grass that’s almost straw.
I found an alpha bird’s blessing – say what? Yup. I betcha it was an alpha bird’s! How could I tell? It was much finer, almost mush. That shows that the grass that made it was nice tender green grass.

There were blessings from an obvious range of pastures: some were full of seeds; some had none; some were different colours. I will soon be able to correlate some seeds in blessings with the plants themselves. One blessing had a whole seed pod in it.
[Can anyone tell me why some blessings have no stones in them, but some have many? Do the birds go through cycles of ingesting and expelling stones? Can anyone explain why so much of the grass is undigested?]

Supremely Tired Emu