Planet Rothschildi

[Tame Emu Guy]

How rude of me not to sent you some sunshine before now:

agapanthus:





These are old tin sheep-watering troughs. You can leave the lattice in place; empty the dirt from the trough after a crop; and re-fill it. Great for tomatoes and peas.





Tomatoes and corn and, on the right, asparagus.



First tomatoes of the season today.






Now, apart from the potatoes, tomato, and the chilli, does anyone know what this is? (and – typical of the era of its production – it’s made of a magnificent hardwood called ‘jarrah.’) There’s a bonus point if you can find any of the slang words for it.





S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

How rude of me not to have sent you some sunshine before now:

agapanthus:





These are old tin sheep-watering troughs. You can leave the lattice in place; empty the dirt from the trough after a crop; and re-fill it. Great for tomatoes and peas.





Tomatoes and corn and, on the right, asparagus.



First tomatoes of the season today.






Now, apart from the potatoes, tomato, and the chilli, does anyone know what this is? (and – typical of the era of its production – it’s made of a magnificent hardwood called ‘jarrah.’) There’s a bonus point if you can find any of the slang words for it.





S.E.

 

[Ashburnham]

I know exactly what it is, because I used one for the first 10 years of my life!
But I will leave it to our overseas friends to try and guess.

M

 

[kbgh]

No need to guess. somebody tore apart an outside loo and that is the seats. Interesting use for it

I used one the first 4 or 5 years of my life here in the states.

 

[kbgh]

LMAO try DUNNY or DUNNY CAN

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

K.B. wins!

The dunny can goes underneath. I'd have accepted 'thunderbox' also.

The fun part was that I was poking my beak in at an abandoned farmhouse; saw this piece of timber leaning against a wall in a shed; and knew immediately what it was. Took me several trips to drag it home.

And yeh, my grandad's place had one, with sheets of newspaper on a nail beside it.

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Third Trip to the Back of My Place



Left at first first light. Found Mystery Female crossing the track fifty yards behind the fig tree. Eric Plus ‘sleep in,’ I’ve noticed. Seriously, they sit for a surprising time, after first light, before they head down to farmhouse. Not M.F., though, it seems.

M. F., then, is probably roosting about 200 yards or less behind the fig. (It was here. She vocalised.)

S.E. has real trouble determining the directions of calls. Sometimes, he can ‘lock in.’ At other times, he can hear the calls clearly; but even pinning them down to a 180-degree vector is hard.

The ‘Tameness Notation Thing’: I think it’s helpful. I certainly find myself thinking with it. For example, M. F. remains a very shy bird; but S.E. passed within about a hundred feet in the semi-darkness this morning. She trotted a few feet (heard not seen). Then stopped. Well, that’s about ‘tame (03).’

[Both M.F. and Audacious snuck into the clearing late yesterday afternoon. Accommodation!

S.E. came out to the carport: E.P. was to the left, and Audacious was ‘ghosting’ about on the right, under the fruit trees. Does Eric know he’s there? At least Audacious is not as dumb as Felicity, who insists in vocalising.
Later, when E.P. had gone to roost, Audacious actually browsed at the fruit trees. Clever Audacious!!
Mystery Female ‘ghost-skirted’ the clearing on the same side at about the same time. The body language of the two interlopers is a dead giveaway! Audacious knows that I know he’s there – he stood watching me watching him; but he still got half in behind the big gum. Remember the joke about ostriches putting their heads in sand? Surely there’s not a fellow-ratite equivalent!!??]


‘Kay, back to the excursion. Here below is the corridor at dawn. Magnificent bird song. Perhaps thirty species of bird. S.E. thought this pasture was ‘off line’ – but the wild emus we observed grazing there last week clearly think otherwise. Point to wild emus!!

The sky in the photo is not a distortion (taken from the pile of logs that I told you about). It looked just like that. When you visit, feel free to go down at dawn or dusk. It’s a different place every day of the year.









Now, before we go on, let’s restate our thesis, guys:

S.E. reckons that the ‘back’ part of ‘my place’ – about 40% of my place – is an emu desert. He’s embarrassed that it’s taken him this long to begin to comprehend this.

He reckons that the dividing line runs east-west just behind the corridor.

Ant the point of All These Stupid Little Theories is that our increasing knowledge is a pastiche: pastures, other foods, roosting, water, territory, breeding, individual and pair and flock behaviour.

Well, at present – as The Big Jump continues (though in a milder season) – we are patiently studying the relations between water sources and the birds’ movements and densities. This seems to have a lot to do with S.E. kneeling in the mud beside dams.

So, the corridor was the jumping-off point. We just checked it to see if any wild birds turned up. We stayed ten minutes, then headed ‘over the line,’ to ‘the back of my place.’ There’s a dam about a hundred yards ‘behind’ (north) of the line, and that’s where we went. (Still having trouble with photos. Patience, please.)

Gee, guys, it was interesting!! Wild birds and other critters are drinking at this dam. We found the track of a surprisingly small chick – possibly one of the surprisingly small chicks in the clutch of seven that we observed at the corridor. Right beside it, we found the track of what S.E. guesses is a fox. So, predator and prey share the same water source! Now, check the photo below, and S.E. will meet you underneath it:







What do you think, readers? S.E. is learning fast: it’s a ‘drinking-beach.’ There’s a clearly visible track leading down to it. It is covered in tracks.


It’s becoming clear that critters prefer these little beaches to kneeling in the sharp-tipped reeds at other points around the dams.

Don’t be fooled by the look of the water in this photo and the one below. There is stuff growing in the dam, but the water is clear and tastes fine.




Now, are we only consider dams? No – but my thesis is that are (almost) no emus at the back of my place, and the tracks on the dam pictured above mean that the line between the got-emus area and the got-no-emus area gets shunted back just a bit.

That is, S.E. thinks that this dam is part of the ‘front’ part of my place, the got-emus part. Birds could be roosting in scrub on the ‘front’ side of the corridor, and grazing on the corridor and elsewhere (?) and popping down to drink at this dam.

Beyond this dam though, readers, wow!! It’s inhospitable country. I mean, it’s not a desert; but . . . ummm . . . well, come for the rest of the tour:

the photo below is classic ‘starvation scrub.’ It was actually taken at another spot (Sad Old Camera playing up); but it’s exactly the same type of scrub. (We got thousands and thousands of square miles of it. Ask me nicely, and I’ll email you some.) Look closely. There’s not a blade of grass on it. Could be grasshoppers etc.




The Thesis, though, rests on the fact that there’s just not anything else in that section. There’s not a wisp of decent pasture (in an area of about three or four hundred acres. I am still working out how big what is).
There are two dams. we’ll come back to that.

A long stretch of the fence at the back is uncrossable. So birds are less likely to be passing through the back of my place on the way to or from anywhere. It’s a sort of ‘pocket.’

Here below is one of the few tiny ‘pastures.’ We’re talking about around a football-field’s worth of it in the whole area in question:





Here below is the best tucker that S.E. could find on that ‘pasture,’ this bit of green and some seeds. (I bet the green came up after the recent rain.) The point is not that it’s not edible. The point is that there’s only a tiny bit of food on the tiny bit of pasture.





Next, we checked the ‘second’ dam. (The photos of the ‘first’ were lost.) So, at this point of the expedition: no sightings of birds. No birds heard. Two old droppings sighted.

The dam has good water, notwithstanding the yukky look of it. The shore is rocky most of the way around. S.E. checked it all. No emu tracks. (Actually, hardly any tracks.) Check the photo below. See the little ‘beach’ in the bottom right corner? It’s a sheet of smooth soft mud, a perfect surface to take prints; but there isn’t a single one, of any critter.


Finally, from memory, the other dam:

it also had no tracks on it. The water wasn’t great, shallow, and fool of growth. I tasted it. It had a ‘dammy, warm-planty’ taste; but it is okay, and critters could drink it if they were in the area.

So, we’ll loop back to this discussion; but S.E. thinks his thesis is proven: there hain’t no emooz livin’ up the back of my block; and that datum helps us understand everything else that is going on on Planet Rothschildi.
If nothing else, readers, I really enjoyed having progressed from never having looked for a track at a dam . . . to being able to find and post good data for us.

S.E.

 

[kbgh]

Quote: Sears and Roebucks catalogs.

 

[kbgh]

Quote: This would make sense when considering you see few to no emu on the back of the property. It may not be that they don't want to be there but perhaps it is that " long stretch of the fence at the back is uncrossable" and thus acts as a gate to prevent them from entering your place.


Your kneeling or watering beach at the dams is a good theory, after all would you like to bend down for a drink and have a reed stick you in the tush???????????


It does seem strange that at the dams would good woater you found no tracks. I would have atleast thought that you would have found roo tracks.

Interesting new observations about the comings and goings at the fig tree and the house clearing.

K.B.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Morning, K.B.

Astute insight on the non-presence of roos. I found myself thinking the same thing. I think the answer is:

they've got teeth, and can chew the long dead grass. I regularly see large numbers of roos happily grazing on pastures that are apparently 'off line' for the emus. Now, the dams up the back simply have no grass in the vicinity. Thus no thirsty roos.

In respect of the 'long length of uncrossable fence'? I am always alert to the balance between providing a pleasant and informative read for BYC-ers, and producing a tome on emus. As long as the posts are, they are condensations.

Here's a bit I left out (actually, that I am gonna clarify and present in pithy form). It is a part of the mosaic-of-environments thing:

imagine that you are looking directly down on my place from on high. Consider what you see as a semi-maze.

For example, suppose there is an uncrossable fence between A and B. -- but wait, curious emus! There's a crossable fence on the west of A, and a crossable fence on the west of B, and a crossable north-south fence between those areas to the west of A and B. Bingo! If there were a lush pasture beyond that one uncrossable fence, there'd be emus on it in a couple of days.

Remember I mentioned tracks through the bush? Ahh!! I mentioned them only in passing, K.B., but they are on the mental list because they are relevant to the maze.

You have touched upon what is the very essence of the 'Category 5a' emu principle:

the birds operate in an enormous maze created by human structures, principally uncrossable fences, roads, and dam.

S.E.