Planet Rothschildi

[Tame Emu Guy]

Morning, K.B.

One is reluctant to express one’s feelings for one’s female emu’s knees, let there be an Animal Protection Officer in the house. Or a Freudian. Or the Psychiatric Emergency Team.

Really, though, she’s a scruffy character; but better-quality photos have been a long time a-comin’. S.E. has retired, but there remains the long-term chance of uploading some video. I'll ask my Computer Guy.

The truly handsome birds are the captive birds. Hands down.

S.E.

 

[kbgh]

Naw, the handsome birds are those that can roam free, chose their mate not have them force fed to them, raise their young, swim the dams, eat the figs and lilly pillies. Those are the handsome one.
K

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Stinky Creek, K.B., is actually on a set-up like mine here: a rental farmhouse on a blue-gum plantation that no one cares what it is if you wander quietly around – except the S.C. place is three times larger than mine, and it backs directly onto the National Park, and the fences are down (hence the mustangs grazing there).

Those emus are in the box seat: they get a bit of ‘human pasture’ to eat; but are ‘based out of’ a truly immense area. They would be the birds around whose neck you’d hang the GPS on a tissue rope: ‘purer’ data!!

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Morning, aficionados!

S.E. gotta borrow his binos back; but meanwhile . . .

remember ‘Third Bird,’ the yearly that was tagging along with Felicity and Noddy? S.E. is sure enough that he was a yearling: he was just a tad small (and a dark bird). Well, yesterday, Felicity arrived at dusk with Noddy and another adult bird. He’s here this morning.

So, we have a little data: Tag Along Guy has been hanging out with Audacious and M.F., and two tag-alongs have turned up with Felicity. That’s three tag-alongs with two established pairs in a fortnight.

Also, the last-pasture-then-roost-then-first-pasture thing. It seems clear enough now that wild birds roost at night by the last pasture that they graze on, and then graze at first light the following morning on the pasture that they left the evening before – or at least one hard by.

Felicity Plus is doing this. Three or four times in the last month, Felicity and Noddy have arrived here at dusk; and S.E. has come to know that she will therefore be quietly kooking outside the house just after dawn the next morning.

The pair that I ‘accidentally’ observed down at Meadow One a few days ago grazed on the pasture by which they had roosted the night before.

So, do Felicity and Noddy and the extra bird roost together?

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

For Yinepu and Everyone Else,

S.E. listening more carefully to calls. Avie has taught me ‘contact calls’ and ‘alarm calls’ – clear enough.

S.E. slunk to the end of carport, and perched quietly on a block of wood: a pair of wild birds was foraging under the lilly pilly, within thirty feet. Turned out to be M.F. and Audacious.

So, before they twigged that I was there, they exchanged ‘contact calls.’ The female’s were the ‘kook kook kook’ type: clearly a ‘vocal sac thing’; but far quieter than ‘booms.’

I sat, trying to think of a way to describe the male’s calls: rather like a male human's snores. I have been calling them ‘gurks.’ That is, long-ish calm quiet ‘guuuurrrks.’

Then they twigged that I was there; and, for the first time, S.E. was waiting for, and then clearly comprehended, the switch to ‘alarm calls.’

M.F. moved quietly away from the tree – she is shy shy shy. She moved about fifty yards, down to an aisle of gums on the edge of the clearing. She uttered a slightly different call – still ‘low key vocal sac,’ but different. I’ll work on describing it.
More importantly, for today, it was recognisably an ‘alarm call.’ More frequent. A little louder.

Audacious remained, foraging. It truly reminded me of when mum calls dad to dinner but he doesn’t come straight away. He calls out, ‘Yes, dear. I’m coming.’

Seriously, readers, the exchange of calls struck me as just that: Mystery Female clearly wanted Audacious to join her. She was (mildly) alarmed. Audacious is bold enough to continue to feed in my presence. He was alert, but definitely not alarmed. So he ‘fobbed her off’ with . . . well, I suppose, a type of contact call.

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

This is the autumn sunset from S.E.'s sitting-to-think-about-the-world place,







Emus will drink surprisingly icky water. They were drinking from this a day before, when it was an inch deeper.




S.E.

 

[yinepu]

For Yinepu and Everyone Else,

S.E. listening more carefully to calls. Avie has taught me ‘contact calls’ and ‘alarm calls’ – clear enough.

S.E. slunk to the end of carport, and perched quietly on a block of wood: a pair of wild birds was foraging under the lilly pilly, within thirty feet. Turned out to be M.F. and Audacious.

So, before they twigged that I was there, they exchanged ‘contact calls.’ The female’s were the ‘kook kook kook’ type: clearly a ‘vocal sac thing’; but far quieter than ‘booms.’

I sat, trying to think of a way to describe the male’s calls: rather like a male humans snores. I have been calling them ‘gurks.’ That is, long-ish calm quiet ‘guuuurrrks.’

Then they twigged that I was there; and, for the first time, S.E. was waiting for, and then clearly comprehended, the switch to ‘alarm calls.’

M.F. moved quietly away from the tree – she is shy shy shy. She moved about fifty yards, down to an aisle of gums on the edge of the clearing. She uttered a slightly different call – still ‘low key vocal sac,’ but different. I’ll work on describing it.
More importantly, for today, it was recognisably an ‘alarm call.’ More frequent. A little louder.

Audacious remained, foraging. It truly reminded me of when mum calls dad to dinner but he doesn’t come straight away. He calls out, ‘Yes, dear. I’m coming.’

Seriously, readers, the exchange of calls struck me as just that: Mystery Female clearly wanted Audacious to join her. She was (mildly) alarmed. Audacious is bold enough to continue to feed in my presence. He was alert, but definitely not alarmed. So he ‘fobbed her off’ with . . . well, I suppose, a type of contact call.

S.E.

 

[kbgh]

What's the picture in the middle S.E.?

K

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Hey, K.B. We don’t have ‘real’ winters here, but it stays cold and wet for a good long period. Every bit of dead wood where there is any bit of shade has this gorgeous moss growing on it.

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

‘In almost all animals, the introduction or discovery of attractive food induces competition.’

Tree of Origin: What Primate Behaviour Can Tell Us about Human Social Evolution, Frans de Waal (ed.)​

‘Provisioning allowed the researchers to make close observations and habituate even the shyest chimpanzees, so that it was eventually possible to follow individuals wherever they went. The technique has been criticised, however, because of its possible effects on behaviour. Long-term studies without provisioning have been established in other areas . . . . [and] these have succeeded in habituating individuals and are producing data behaviour comparable to those from provisioned sites.’

Ibid.​

Hi, guys. Clearly, we’re gonna ‘convert’ this info to our birds. I think there’s food for thought here – S.E. has been attentive for ages to the likelihood/fact that ‘provisioning’ has ‘heated’ the dynamic of the house-clearing.

So . . . yes, it has.

But the chimp data from unprovisioned sites transpired to be comparable.

How about ‘quality’ and ‘quantity’: that is, certain things happen, but they happen a little more often here.

Perhaps the most noticeable thing has been the far fewer instances of aggression that I’ve seen in ‘further afield’ observations – Coffey’s, Oudman’s, Stinky Creek, The 500. It may have seemed bleedin’ pointless for S.E. to sit and watch four emus do almost nothing five hundred yards away. All together, though, these observations probably represent a better picture of normal emu life than what we see in the house-clearing.

So, how about: there existed, prehistorically, entirely natural sources of ‘concentrated attractive food ‘on this continent, such as a grove of quandong plums or lilly pillies. Thus, the sort of ‘hot spot’ that the house-clearing has always existed to some lesser degree at other times and places.

And the clearing here was ‘hot’ before I turned up, but I have ‘heated’ it a little further.

However, if we understand that what we are seeing are basic behaviours ‘with the volume turned up’ a little, we can adjust for that.

S.E.