Planet Rothschildi

[ThePendragon]

What type of tree is that in the center?
Very interesting veiw of alpha,how tall its standing.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Hey, B.R.

Lovely to know that you are reading. (I’ve figured out the ‘Views thing’: people are patiently regularly reading.)

It’s a eucaplytus, a ‘blue gum,’ B.R. eucalyptus globulus. It is the only species of tree planted on the plantations. We are too clever to get ourselves into the debate about . . . it all; but if you Flash-Earthed your way from my place to the coast, you’d be able to recognise thousands and thousands and thousands of acres of farmland ‘under gums.’

Speaking emu-logically, they are usually a desert. Full stop. They are a ‘monoculture environment.’ The Top Corner is an exception only because the gums are still short, and grass is still able to ‘hold’ the aisles. The 500, B.R., is a failure as a plantation. Its trees are stunted, and there are many gaps in the rows. So – in the same way as the Top Corner – there is a thriving little eco-system happening in each and every aisle.

I shall post something further about the ‘5a Category’ thing soon. Once upon a time, the emus were operating on a sort of giant flat plain (plane).
Now, there isn’t a ‘natural’ emu left. Every bird is, somehow or other, living in some relation to human dams and human fences and overgrown National Park and deforestation/urbanisation and human blue gum plantations.

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Hmmm . . . seems that this morning is Odd Photos Day. Here below is Felicity in the bush up near the highway, giving Supreme Emu a lesson in What Real Emus Think Is Yummy. Actually, several attempts at this project have gone poorly. Firstly, S.E. lures Felicity (or Greedy) into the bush. Then he sits to watch. Then Felicity comes over to see if there’s any more food. Then she wanders off to graze. Then S.E. tries to get close enough to see what she is grazing on.

Then she comes over to see if there’s any more food . . .

But it is fun to take the birds into the bush, and if any of you visit, you can try. You fill your pockets with wheat, and call out, ‘Come on, Sweetie!’ and she’ll generally follow you for a half a mile or so, ‘til she gets bored. One day, she came all the way to The 500, and wandered off with some wild birds. (I spotted her later with them.)




Finally this morning, a Report on Eric’s World

Wa ha ha . . . .

[Cough, splutter]

No, be serious, S.E.!!

[Clear throat]:

all emus are equal, but some are more equal than others. Eric is an important personage in The Project – but that doesn’t mean that we have to feel sorry for him. . Eric is a blasted bully, a horrible person.

So, we now get to have a little giggle at him. As mentioned above, the fruit is starting to literally rain from the trees. Eric has, in the evolutionary sense, been doing very well by his offspring; but the tide is turning, that Sweet Moment is ending. In the last ten days, we’ve seen the following:

Speckles (with Sarah quietly behind) has been surprisingly assertive. Eric drives him off without any trouble, but Speckles is leaning on Eric’s dream.

Felicity (with Felix quietly behind) really does seem to have shifted her territory. She has been visiting about once a fortnight for months; but in recent days, her daily visits suggest that she (‘Felicity Plus’ is the correct way to see it) has shifted her base. For example, I saw her sitting in an aisle of the gums just a minute ago. She’s waiting for Eric Plus to choof off somewhere, so she can sneak into the clearing. Felicity is also leaning on Eric’s dream.

Next comes The Foreign Bird. I am eager to see if it re-appears. All readers are welcome to their own feelings on this issue, but I personally am not gonna lose any sleep over the thought of Eric grovelling on his belly in the dirt.

Next next: if we are vaguely right about the birds moving about more at present, and with fruit remaining plentiful, we may see more birds poking their beaks into Eric’s larder.

Finally, don’t forget that Greedy is out there somewhere. In a perfect Project, S.E. would keep a register of comings and goings. It has been a while since we saw Greedy – in fact, come to think of it, quite a while, not since she dumped Speckles.
Recall the fuss that S.E. made over the fight for supremacy here in winter. Well, it’s still going on: Greedy, Felicity, Eric, The Foreign Bird, Speckles? ????

Supreme Emu

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Truth to tell, loyal readers, not much naughtiness happens here at the farmhouse; but once a fortnight I go to town (emus scatter into the bush) with a local guy, and we shop, and he drops me back in paradise (emus scatter into the bush).

The guy at the local bottle-oh can’t make me out.

(A bottle-oh is a drive-in liquor place. You are all learning some Australian English, as is only fitting)

Each and every fortnight, regular as clockwork, I buy . . .

one bottle of beer (a fine stout).

So, it’s the Sunday before Christmas. We are drinking our (count them) one bottle of beer, and writing the blog, and listening to music.

I should mention that the first dozen CDs on the pile are all American: Michelle Shocked, Red Hot Johnston, Taj Mahal, Sonny Terry and Brian McGee . . .

Guess what? The citizens of Planet Rothschildi are baby boomers.

I saw Eric Plus enjoying a spirited spazzy dance a minute ago. The chicks can spontaneously sprint nigh on a half a mile – hundreds and hundreds of yards. Eric completely left the ground at one stage, complete with flinging one leg at the moon in the process.

Saw four wild birds in the clearing as I arrived home yesterday. It did not escape my attention that they were all at the old sheep-loading ramp. I’ve just walked over to have a look. Ahh!! The rain has brought up, just where the pooh has enriched the ground, some lovely sprouts of real ‘green pick.’

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

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.

 

[Raptor65]

I saw Eric Plus enjoying a spirited spazzy dance a minute ago. The chicks can spontaneously sprint nigh on a half a mile – hundreds and hundreds of yards. Eric completely left the ground at one stage, complete with flinging one leg at the moon in the process.

Reminds me of Gerry out for his morning run.

 

[kbgh]

So on your ride about, you must have gone down the Muirs past the Frankland and stinky Creek and then found back roads. My flash trip found what you were talking about (I think)

Interesting observations about 5a birds. They kinda sound like our wildlife. The wild turkeys,deer and even black bears find that they can co-habit with humans by living on human terms and find food from the realms of the humans. It sounds like the emu have adapted to the humans in Oz in a similar manner.

Just how large is that one bottle of stout?


Quote: Chillin to the Blues huh S.E.

Quote: Hay surrogate GRANDPA S.E. guss the babies are growing up huh

Quote:
Now that the plums are ripening and fallin, it will be interesting to see who is the dominate bird. For some reason iI feel the even though you saw them at the sheep ramp, they probably know that the plums are falling and that the twenty eight are dropping.

K.B.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Hi, K.B. The fun of the trip was that, although S.E. knew where he was, he didn’t know where he was.

Chicks getting bigger? I am a pace behind many on BYC. This is my first experience of young chicks. Just today, I took some photos of them. Goodness, Alpha is getting a suit of real (little) feathers.

The Categories Thing: we started in on this notion last winter, K.B. It’s fun to think that several readers have been aboard for months and months, from the time we made our very first ‘formal’ trips to outlying pastures.

(You became a citizen of Planet Rothschildi on the very day we went back for further observations to ‘out the back of Oudman’s.’ It was out there, on the edge of the National Park, that we began to even vaguely comprehend the scales of distances that we were dealing with.)

We figured that understanding emus was a more scientific business if you didn’t fool yourself about the birds’ environment. Whether it’s two birds in a nice pen, or a flockette in a huge enclosure with woods and a pond, or the birds on my place, ultimately, husbanding these critters has everything to do with the difference between their prehistoric environment and their modern ones.



This general perspective is now my primary one, and this road trip showed that it is appropriate. Any reader along for the ride would have had the same sense as I did: ‘These birds’ environment is affected by humans.’ (‘Effected,’ actually.)

So, yes, Our Categories Theory would apply to most any study of life-forms, though emus are perhaps a ‘strong’ case because they evolved in the ‘assumption’ of enormous territory to wander about in.


Finally, what else did the four wild birds know? Can anyone tell us an anecdote about the acuity of an emu’s sense of smell? How far away can they smell water?

Yeh, K.B., I agree with you: the birds know what else is available.

Here’s a thought that I was going to post this very afternoon:

suppose we marked Meadow Two out in ten-yard-square sections, and checked the density of fresh blessings for a couple of days. I betcha, readers, that I could pick which spots would have the most.

How? Well, it seems – and this is related to the wild birds at the sheep-loading ramp – that birds sometimes graze only on the edge of a pasture. Two thirds of the birds that I have ever sighted down at Meadow Two have been in one of two corners. Those corners are the ones 'down the back,' adjoining the tracks on which the birds travel from one pasture to another.
It seems those particular birds aren't too enthusiastic about grazing across to the far corner of the pasture, which would take them rather towards a sterile corner of gums with uncrossable fences.


Well, the house-clearing likewise has a couple of minor divisions. Really shy birds just don’t come over to the house side of the house-clearing. They stay in far-flung corners of the Empire. Eric knows they're there, but they aren’t worth the trouble of confronting.
Don’t forget that the shy birds also ‘use’ the island of scrub just down the back as a place to rendezvous with my birds. There are wheels within wheels.


S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Hi, Raptor.

Goodness!! That's the best spazzy dance ever ever.

What do you think a spazzy dance is about? I suspect a good joint-loosening stretch.

And that's Gerry? Wow!! He's much much bigger than he was in the last photo I saw of him.


S.E.

 

[Raptor65]

Best I can tell, the spazzy dance is an expression of excitement, and nothing gets Gerry more excited than a morning run, especially if I'm out there egging him on and sometimes the horses get in on it too and start kicking their heels up and hopping around right along with him. The faster I whistle, the faster Gerry runs until he's too tired and goes to eat his breakfast