Planet Rothschildi

[Tame Emu Guy]

I didn't say that . . .


wa ha ha ha . . .

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

[S.E. go to town; S.E. scrub floors; S.E. fall asleep in the heat.]

New Policy: whenever S.E. sees an emu grazing, he shall get on his hands and knees, and examine the area in question. We did this yesterday at a spot at ‘the front’ of The 500. Noted that some ‘weeds’ that we thought were Unyummy actually have succulent green leaves at their centre.

Brief observation this morning (went to town):

Audacious Emu was present – I think he is a male! I heard him reply to a female that has been vocalising from just behind the fig tree. She uttered two good strong strings of booms post-dawn this morning, 14 and 16 booms. She must be almost within sight.

S.E

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

‘it was suggested in the study, that the earlier the male begins to incubate, the more likely he will father the majority of eggs in the nest.’

[http://tolweb.org/treehouses/?treehouse_id=4729]

This has come to mind, aficionados.

Could it be that . . . there is ‘split’ in the model that we read of whereby the early breeders, which might include pairs like Eric and Mrs. Eric (whose inter-seasonal partnership should not, according to the Net, exist) and also alpha birds, tend to breed ‘tightly’ because they each know that the other is a good genetic bet, and later ‘looser’ breeders, represented by those females who have already ‘pinned down’ one male then seek other males?


That is, the eggs in the ‘post-first-consort’ male’s nest are more likely to come from different fathers?

Recall that in the winter thread we noted that some females were enthusiastically pre-dawn booming late late into the breeding season, presumably in the hope of producing eggs with what we would suspect were somewhat-less-then-prime male emus ('cause the prime birds would already be incubating).

S.E.

S.E.

 

[kbgh]

That theory makes full sense. "Bonded" pairs may have the intuition that their mates are producing strong progeny and perhaps even feel that they don't need a clutch of 7-12 to carry on their line.


Quote: I could see where it would be feasible that an in-experienced male would allow several different hens to lays eggs in his nest and those eggs could also be from different fathers. You could say a sitting male may have "adopted" other birds eggs. This could account for the variations in color and body stature in a large clutch of chicks. Also in high predation areas it may be "mother nature's" way of ensuring that some chicks survive. The larger the clutch the more chance of some surving to breeding age.

Earlier I asked how long the males care for chicks. I found this:

Quote:
We might see this first hand in the case of Eric with Alpha and Omega. Should make interesting observations. If Eric doesn't nest this year, we'll have atleast one possible (potential) answer.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Morning, K.B.!!

I like your idea about ‘intuition’ between the male and female of a bonded pair. Although I still have years of observations to make in order to be sure, I know that (a) Mr Net says that emus don’t stay together from season to season, and (b) that Eric and Mrs. Eric stayed together from season to season.

How long do the males parent the chicks? The only thing I am certain of is that Internet data is contradictory. I have seen figures as low as six months.

(A note here: S.E. has on a number of occasions seen data that has clearly been collected from and pertains to captive commercial birds, but that fact has not been mentioned. For example, at what age do emus begin to mate? Well, hit the Net, and get figures there, then hit BYC, and get anecdotes there. I promise you that you will find a startling discrepancy!)

What is pivotal – truly pivotal – is whether the general mode is:

(a) the male cuts the chicks loose before the following mating-season, which frees males to mate every year; or

(b) the male parents for one day longer than a year, in which case he won’t be free to mate the following year.

Indeed, it’s a little twistier than that because:

suppose dad cuts the chicks loose at 11 months. Could he then find a mate in time? Suppose he boots the chicks out at 10 months? Would that give him sufficient time?

etc. etc. . . .

Finally, I doubt if Eric’s behaviour vis a vis this present clutch is good data because maybe Eric will leave them earlier because (a) they will have grown so well and fast on the very rich diet here, and (b) he may sense (?) that that will continue to be the case.

(This is a part of our general caution about the quality of data here. For example, does S.E. think that we should disregard data about what types of grasses an emu finds Yummy because the bird observed eating the grasses was a tame bird? I don’t think so. I can’t readily see how it’s relevant.

Conversely, would we be wary about data about territoriality collected here at the house? Yes we would. Why? because so many aspect of territoriality have been bent out of shape here at the farmhouse.)

I reckon the best data would be observations of wild chicks (of whatever age, readers – right up to late adolescence) in company with a bird that is obviously their dad.

Further to this – good heavens! There is so much work to be done! – S.E. has seen, on no less than a dozen occasions, a three-quarters-grown chick with a flockette. So, how does that fit in?

S.E. struggling at this second. Gotta keep working. Will completely rethink the above.

Yesterday afternoon, S.E. heard (not the reply that marked Audacioius as a male) a lovely spirited mating-season male-female exchange. The male only replied the once, but the female’s call was loud and lusty, and it’s still seven weeks short of autumn.

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

[Gotta take a break!]

Morning, all.

Before today’s report, let’s step back, and check the Cast of Characters:

Eric: don’t forget, the house-clearing is not his home territory – say what? Nope. He just skims the cream off the milk ‘cause he can. He will disappear the day after the last fig is eaten.
Recall Boy Emu. He left with his chicks the first minute he could. Why? He came here with Greedy. His territory is somewhere else. Well, Eric is the same.

[I have had the fine experience of meeting Eric quite a distance from the house, months after I’d seen him here. S.E. was guilty of sitting quietly in a sunny glade down near the corridor, and looked up to see a pair of wild birds walking quietly towards me. It took me a minute to figure it out, and I shared my apple with Eric.]

Mrs. Eric: don’t know!! Will she re-appear in autumn? Her reappearance would be a great datum: three years with Eric. (We may assume that Alpha and Omega are her chicks because the first observed mating last autumn was Eric and Mrs. Eric.

Moreover, recall what the quotation said about how many of a nesting male’s eggs are his. Eric and Mrs. Eric are surely an ‘alpha’ couple: mature, well-fed. If any bird had a high percentage of his own chicks in his clutch, it would be Eric.)

Felicity and Greedy: who knows? Felicity seems to have a consort, though we haven’t seen her for some weeks. We haven’t seen Greedy for quite some time.

Audacious: a new personality. He has taken to skirting the whole clearing, certainly to graze. For a one-eyed player, he really is holding his own.

Speckles and Sarah: I was wrong about the ‘tightness’ of their orbit: haven’t seen them for some days.


Raining again yesterday. This has become a prime clutch-raising season.

The rain makes it easy – quiet – to move about the gums . . . and S.E. really needed a break. Here below is the view from ‘behind’ the fig tree, that is, you can’t even see the farmhouse:



Now here below is the absolutely-foodless ‘jumping-off’ area in which Audacious and others are now ‘operating’:



I have heard the ‘Mystery Female’ numerous times in recent days. Have birds already prioritised the hangin’ around activities of the mating-season over simply being on a pasture and grazing? That is, guys, if you aren’t grazing on the house-clearing pasture/eating figs, you are standing around in the soul-less gums.

This morning I drifted quietly down behind the fig, and was well rewarded. Five birds in orbit: Eric Plus, quietly ‘patrolling’; Audacious, already about ‘tame05’ – no longer bolts when he sees me; and . . . Mystery Female!

That’s her, in the photo below, at the back, behind Eric. It's apparent that I will be able to observe them closely as soon as . . . the last window is washed.




S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Just saw a chick spontaneously jump the backyard fence (at the low point). Blast! I hate to see my birds in contact with wire. Their desire to move in a straight line to rejoin their fellows simply causes their intelligence to ‘click out.’

The following quotation turned up in yesterday’s lie-down-and-rest reading:

‘Rather than focusing on time, Imanishi emphasized space in his approach to the natural world. He highlighted the harmony of all living things rather than conflict and competition among individual organisms.’

Kinji Imanishi, paraphrased in Cultural Anthropology: The Human Challenge​

Now, one of my primary interests is the relationships between academia and politics, and it was ‘Emus!!’ that popped immediately into my head as an example of how obviously this guy’s perspective is personal-subjective rather than academic-hopefully objective.

Imagine if we were tasked to sit in my backyard, and study emus without mentioning time or conflict. We could say how pretty their feathers are, or that they are cloacal.

Otherwise . . . umm . . . the life of the emu is pretty much centred on time (the yearly cycle of ‘bulking up’ to breed and parent) and conflict to gain mates to do just that.

S.E.

 

[kbgh]

I assume the first two pictures are in the gums and the las one an aisle between sections of gums.

Could it be that a new Mrs. E is courting Eric or should I say making a pass at him.

I wonder if Eric is interested in her and just maybe he feels the chicks are ready to fend for themselves. I guess time will tell us.

 

[Ashburnham]

I'll go with good old Darwin every time,
rather than some ivory tower academic.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Thank you so much, Ashburnham.

I am engaged in a slow-motion head-banging with an old mate of mine over this – and it’s still absolutely all about emus, loyal readers. The fact that Supreme Emu just happened to be studying this when he took the farmhouse, and found outright daily Darwinian struggle going on at all points of the compass, was just One of Those Things in Life. Fruitfully fortuitous. I have perhaps never mentioned that -- apart from not having a t.v. -- there is a solidly-serious 1,400-volume library here.

[We both stand on the ‘socio-biological’ side of the nature-nurture spectrum; but we are squabbling over how ‘hard’ a position to take, principally in that humans exhibit quite a few clear exceptions to the always-and-only-full-steam-ahead tendency to reproduction expressed by Darwin.]

Readers would have been shocked to have witnessed the craziness of the morning on which Number One turned up with her thighs bound in wire. Greedy and Felicity both immediately tried to kill her; and that usually gentle character Supreme Emu stopped Greedy in her tracks with a well-placed rock to the chest while almost literally holding Felicity at bay with the other hand. [R.I.P. Number One]

It is not my intention to gratuitously shock by posting things like pictures of the sun-bleached bones of emus that died trying to cross fences; but it seems unhelpful to undertake to document how emus here really live if I don’t document how emus here really live.

S.E.