Planet Rothschildi

[Tame Emu Guy]

Hey, Yinepu.

[S.E. is not really here. S.E. is hitching to Perth in a couple of hours, and the First Autumn Rains are hammering on the iron roof.]

Well, could everyone please post ‘yay’ or ‘nay’: do your birds groom each other?

I hasn’t seen a single instance of wild emus grooming each other.

S.E.

 

[yinepu]

Lol.. maybe my guys are just weird... they also like it when I run my fingers through their feathers.. and will reciprocate by "grooming" my hair

 

[kathyinmo]

I have not seen my emus groom each other.

I will watch closer for that. Maybe I have overlooked it.

YES, they do groom my hair!

 

[Ashburnham]

Flying fox after the ripe figs-

 

[kbgh]

OK, I found the Flying Fox in the first picture. Shining eyes at 3:00 oclock. But where is he in the second picture? Is he the dark spot also at 3:00 in the second?

For some reason I thought the figs were a lot bigger than the pictures show.

Kerry

 

[Ashburnham]

Yep- dark spot- he has turned his head away from the camera.
Also he is hanging upside down.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

S.E. back from Big City. Big City is no fun. Got no emus. Just got concrete.

My mate Ian drove me home, and his four-year-old, Phoenix, came for the ride. There are adults in the district who are afraid to feed the emus, but Phoenix fed Greedy when she was two and a half. They must seem a mile high to her!

Here’s an odd thing:

now, normally, guys, a wild female emu booms at intervals through the night during mating-season. The frequency increases towards dawn. Each string is between about eight and eighteen booms long (depending on the bird), and each individual boom sounds the same. Also, the whole thing has a rather ‘sleepy’ quality to it, languorous.

Well, early this morning, Felicity – it was surely Felicity – uttered, over about a quarter of an hour, a quite different ‘set’ of booms. The booms were mostly ‘doubles’ (it happens sometimes): ‘ . . . baboom baboom . . . ’ The strings were mostly much longer – I counted eighteen in one. The strings were much closer together. The spacing was out of whack: as few as three booms in one string. And finally, they lacked the sleepy quality.

Then there was a silence.

Then about ten minutes of quite normal booms.

[S.E. was lying patiently in bed, in perfect farmhouse-pre-dawn quiet, listening with interest.]

Then more silence.

Then another round of strange booms.

I feel a bit silly describing this, but it was a first. Could there have been a predator? A fox? Anyone have any ideas?

Meanwhile,

woo hoo!! It’s classical mating-season here today!! There are at least four or five foreign birds in orbit. There were two foreign females audible down the back while I was treating Felicity with Little Lunch Sultanas. I just busted a wild bird finishing off Felicity’s wheat just by the lilly pilly tree.

I cleaned all the windows for the house inspection, and it has really paid off. Long-term readers know that the ‘Emu Observation Facility’ – my house -- provides views of wild birds from most rooms at this time of year. If you crawl on your hands and knees across the floor of the north-west bedroom, you can watch from about twenty or thirty feet – as close as ten or twelve feet occasionally – the wild birds that approach the house during Cheeky Season.

Seriously, guys, it goes like this: if you are just doing normal daily stuff around the house and yard, the birds become alert, but they do stay ‘in orbit.’ They do emu stuff, and it’s endlessly enjoyable to watch them – but the academic quality of the observations is not at all high because there’s a lot of observer affect in these cases.

However . . . if, for example, there’s been no visible activity for a couple of hours (like S.E. is napping . . . ) then the house becomes a neutral element, and the wild birds behave normally.

(One must bear in mind that the tame birds’ activities are always in part a product of their tameness. For example, Felicity knows that wild birds won’t attach her in the backyard, so she sometimes retreats to the backyard during prolonged interactions.)

Thus, if you are awakened from a nap by boomings and gurkings, and even the sounds of birds charging past the house, you can then get dressed very quietly, and start observing from inside the house. It is well well worth the effort during mating-season. You might get ten or fifteen minutes of observing birds that don’t know you are there, and it doesn’t get better than that.]

Felicity has come scorching through the back yard two times while I’ve been typing, which is a bad sign: if she's running, she's losing. The next two weeks will decide Felicity's future.

Neither Eric nor Greedy are here at present. She is on her home turf. That’s a huge advantage.

She’s been staying away some nights, which suggests that she’s actively seeking a consort.

However, readers, if Felicity can’t crack it very soon, she’s gonna be a spinster. She needs a consort, and she needs to establish a fairly solid control of the house-clearing.

It’s still appropriate to label her an alpha bird: there are very few birds around here that can stand up to her. Nevertheless . . .

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Haven't been able to upload photos for weeks. Can at this second. Go!:

This may well be the last we ever see of Alpha Chick and Omega Chick unless they turn up some day, and we can identify them by their tameness:

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Quck! Upload photos! Here is Felicity hunting figs:

 

[kbgh]

Great shot S.E. Looks like Felicity is feeing better. Kerry