Planet Rothschildi

[Tame Emu Guy]

[S.E. in extremis. Almost 105 today. Struggling to scrub floors. Town tomorrow.]

Birds came and went through the heat of the day. Rather quiet this evening.

S.E.

 

[kbgh]

As usual (even with old camera) great pics.

I had to really look to identify the emu in the one (Eric and Omega) and Audacious blended right in with the background.


Quote: Previously, you have stated that a lot of the fruit is either ripe or close to it. I would assume that this "bounty" of fruits (plums, figs, grapes and your tomatoes) have enticed them to your house clearing. It will be interesting to see if once the "bounty" disappears for the season, any of the interlopers stay, or just the imprinted ones. (Eric Plus, S&S, Greedy and consort, and perhaps Audacious)

Your observations on the "dawn" and "dusk" excursions to the house clearing stands to reason. They are beating the heat in the AM and normally I would assume that it cools down as the sun sets so they are beating the heat in the PM before going to roost. During the day, I would bet they have found some "cooler" spots for day roosts. Perhaps well shaded near the dams. We see the same thing with the wild turkeys, here in the early AM and again just at dusk.

Your "silvereyes" remind me of our Blue Jays. Raucous, gregarious and love tomatoes.

You get roos in in the garden, easy to identify by the tracks, we get white tail deer, easy to identify by their tracks.

K.B.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

[S.E. a little better; resting.]

S.E. walked to the river at dawn this morning. I have heard birds down there before, but was intrigued that I didn’t hear a single emu this morning. My point here is that K.B. and I have been fumbling about with satellite photos, trying to gain a feel for emu life. Water – quality water -- is a key.

Do the wild birds drink the river water? It’s not great. (I’ve tried it.) Whether they drink it or not would be a pivotal datum if you were observing nearer the river. I will try to get down there to see if there are tracks on the banks.

S.E. had a cup of tea with the elderly country women of the local opshop (Goodwill). We were talking about snakes. I asked if they thought that a big snake could eat a little chick. They were unsure – but when I asked them if the big lizards, the ‘bungarras,’ could eat emu eggs, they both unhesitatingly said yes.

On the way home, S.E. got picked up by . . . a bird-watcher! Joanna is a Dutch biology student studying a species of the wrens. (I have mentioned the fabulous fabulous fabulous blue ‘Splendid Fairy Wren’ that lives in my garden.) Any citizen of Planet Rothschildi would have been able to follow the conversation.
Of course, it was the differences that were interesting. The territory of these wrens is about 2.2 acres. Full stop. Their chick-raising dynamic involves the chicks of the previous year, that is, each years’ chicks are raised by both the parents and last year’s chicks.

She tells me that they can’t identify individuals merely by sight, but the birds are banded with three bands of different colours, so a bird might be ‘blue blue red.’ She notes that high-powered binos or telescopes aren’t helpful because the wrens move constantly.

She found really interesting some of the details about my observations, such as being able to tell an alpha bird’s blessing from its content. It was like speaking a common language.

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Evening all!

Let’s try something, a sort of ‘log.’ We are interested to see how the birds behave, both in respects of territory and forming breeding-pairs, as we head down the home straight of our project of one year of observations. So, let’s start a collection of logs, which will show the development of ‘dynamics’ like the increase in the size of groups of birds that come.

How about something like this:

Weather: still, over 105 in the shade
Movements:

4:00 pm: female audible; E.P. in orbit, mouths open but not panting (! Better man than me, Gunga Din!)
4:00: E.P. browse shady side of fig and rest
4:45: bird close to Eric – female?
5:00 breeze began, temp. fell
7:00 E.P. withdrew to roost
7:07 female calls nearby

Note: the birds principally approach from the north east. Must consider that. Certainly provides insight into daily ‘range.’ Birds do come from the south side, but less at this time of year.

Note: tomorrow morning should provide really good observations.

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

K.B. asked about the food in the house-clearing. We’ve discussed this, but . . .

S.E. recalls, as a 24-year-old country lad, how fantastic the Sumatran jungle was. Mangoes etc. grow wild there – that is, they are natives. Conversely, Australia – particularly the range of the woodwardi – is, overall, pretty hard country. I mention this only because I was thinking where in nature there might be the sort of profusion of food that would produce a natural version of what is going on here.

There’s a ‘plum’ called the ‘quandong,’ and it is apparently (it’s been coming up in my reading of Australian aboriginal history since I was a teenager) one of the, perhaps the only, native fruits.

Apparently, the trees bear profusely at times, and may grow in little groves (and is native to the range of the rothschildi).

Voila!! There’s a native equivalent of the food-rich environment here! This is relevant to our observations in that the profusion of emu activity is not necessarily artificial.

Kookaburra has called. The morning air here is not only exquisite, but in a different flavour every day. It smells rather like damp hay this morning.

S.E. will report a little later.

S.E.

 

[Ashburnham]

Great work mate. All the surface water around here has finally dried up
(for about the first time in 2 years), so the local wallabies and roos are travelling
further afield. Not that it has been particularly hot- only 3 days over 35 so far.
I wonder how all the feral deer are getting on - I must set up my game cameras again.

Happy New Year

Michael

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Ashburnham!!

Isn't it satisfying to have developed something of this analytical ability!

Happy New Year to you, to everyone.

Supreme Emu

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

What a puzzling day!

Dawn: clear and cool. A female calling quietly to the west. I think it’s the same one that I heard some weeks ago, when I was checking E.P.’s roost at dawn.

S.E. snuck down to the island of scrub behind the house-clearing. S.E. hoped to see birds arrive. He expected birds. Birds didn’t come.

Let’s jump to the weather: yesterday was dead still and the sun was a blowtorch. Today was cooler . . . by the thermometer . . . but the wind was a blowtorch. The birds we observed all had their beaks open, and their wings moving slightly as they breathed; but they weren’t outright panting.

It’s now 5:00 pm. A cool change has come in, and it’s spotting rain.

My point is . . . did the birds know just how hot it was going to be? And just kept all movement to a minimum? Within a half an hour of the cool wind’s arrival, three wild birds had turned up.

Audacious was one – but let’s back up:

Audacious may well turn out to be the most interesting avian personality we’ve ever had to observe. He was here at 5:30 am. He was one of the three who came to the fig tree when the cool breeze arrived twelve hours later. He was in sight, sitting quietly in an aisle hard by the figs, almost every time I went to look. At one point this morning – already hot – he and Eric couldn’t have been more than eighty feet apart; but not a single vocalisation passed between them. Audacious dined on figs while E.P. were away.

That is, what was notable again today, readers, is what I noted yesterday and the day before: Audacious seems to have a faculty that we have not observed before, a faculty to stay in close orbit without attracting reprisal, and to slip in when the coast is clear. Could it be that his partial blindness has forced him to adopt different strategies? Suppose you were living in Dickensian circumstances, and you were old and partially blind. It would make sense to rely on ‘life experience’ rather than physical power, wouldn’t it! Let’s wait and see.

[Does he attract mates? Why does S.E. think he’s male?]

All in all, an inconclusive day. Though it does seem that emus have enough sense to limit their movement over really hot periods.

[In this district, readers, we get hot hot days; but one or two of those always draws a cool change. This hot spell is finished. We shall have days of cooler temperatures and light rain. S.E. heaves a sigh of relief.]

Supreme Emu

 

[kbgh]

Your observations and comments about the emu not moving around much in the "heat of the day" is mother nature's mechanism for handling stress on animals. They have the intuition to conserve energy under times of stress and high temps are definitely stress inducers. If you look at the roos, I'd be willing to bet that they in the gums or protected areas of scrub and perhaps near dams.

One would suspect that Audacious has learned to adapt to his handicap and you are probably quite right in your and even perhaps Eric know of senses his handicap and therefore not a major threat. As you have indicated time will tell.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Morning, K.B.!

Your supposition about the roos is correct. They lie about.

And yes, the energy-conservation thing . . . but at the same time, they must both keep body and soul together, and bulk up for winter.

[And why do I never catch emus drinking at dams? Even in mid-summer?]

S.E.