Planet Rothschildi

[Avie]

the One-Year Project is done, readers; and S.E. is ‘treading water’ until surgery.

However . . . we have entered a ‘sweet spot’ in which, although the reports will be scrappy and local, this is the second time that we have been observing at this time of year.

Thus, we are seeing (and hearing) many things, in effect, for the first time.

When S.E. has recovered from surgery, I wish we could chip in to buy him one of these...!



This kind of microphone focuses on the individual sound and cuts away (most of) the extraneous sounds.
I think bird vocalizations are one of my favorite parts of bird behavior. Their hearing is so much better than ours and they hear so much more structure than we do.

This vid cracks me up

At normal speed it just sounds like a blur of tweety noises, but at 1/3 speed you can hear a lot more structure.



And this tiny bird created that song! WHAT is going on in their little birdie brains!!!

Just amazing.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Hi, Avie. Thanks for your enthusiasm. The directional mike would get us high high quality recordings.

‘Accommodation’ is today’s word. F. and N. are here. Dark and Pushy are here. Felicity chases Dark or Pushy a couple of feet.
Pouring rain. Soggy, ‘skinny’ birds. Wa ha ha.

Great video of bird calls. Gee, emus are – it hadn’t registered – a relatively quiet species.

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

I wandered out to audit when I heard an emu call at a distance. Felicity was alone, by the lilly pilly. S.E. sat to audit.

So, we’re still struggling with the description of calls; but here, ‘on the ground,’ S.E. is making real progress. Here is a report on a much much less usual ‘suite of vocalisations.’

We heard a call that is less usual. S.E. has heard it before. It is neither a ‘gurk’ nor any level of ‘boom.’ Not sure if it’s a male or a female.

What happened was: we heard this call from an (invisible) bird that was a short distance to the north west. But only three or four of these calls over ten minutes.

Felicity reacted: she faced the (invisible) bird; raised some ruff; and began to boom. The booms were not the ‘night-time’ strings. They were a ‘bounce boom’: ‘baboom, baboom, boom, baboom.’ Clearly hostile. They sort of ‘bubbled along.’

F. began to advance towards the bird; and S.E. was able to observe and audit well (still without binos) because F. was moving across my line of sight.

F. continued to boom. The foreign bird didn’t reply. F. produced almost a boom per step for about thirty yards.

S.E. decided to blunder quietly after F. (To ‘blunder quietly’ is an accurate expression if you’re wearing gumboots.) S.E. observed the foreign bird moving quietly through the gums. Quite close, actually. No confrontation. No further vocalisations. (To get ‘into’ an interaction among emus is a cool and rare thing.)

So, in closing: we are unsure:

was the interloper ‘sounding out’ Felicity/the birds in the house-clearing with this less-than-usual call? F. reacted with another less-than-usual mode of vocalisation, this 'boom-per-step' model, which was accompanied by the raised ruff and head-held-high-and-in-one-direction stare that we have seen at other times: definitely hostile.



Otherwise, citizens: F. and N. seem to be present here more often now. Dark and Pushy haven’t turned up today. It’s been a little while since we saw M.F. and Audacious. Haven’t seen Alpha Chick.

S.E.

 

[yinepu]

I wandered out to audit when I heard an emu call at a distance. Felicity was alone, by the lilly pilly. S.E. sat to audit.

So, we’re still struggling with the description of calls; but here, ‘on the ground,’ S.E. is making real progress. Here is a report on a much much less usual ‘suite of vocalisations.’

We heard a call that is less usual. S.E. has heard it before. It is neither a ‘gurk’ nor any level of ‘boom.’ Not sure if it’s a male or a female.

What happened was: we heard this call from an (invisible) bird that was a short distance to the north west. But only three or four of these calls over ten minutes.

Felicity reacted: she faced the (invisible) bird; raised some ruff; and began to boom. The booms were not the ‘night-time’ strings. They were a ‘bounce boom’: ‘baboom, baboom, boom, baboom.’ Clearly hostile. They sort of ‘bubbled along.’

F. began to advance towards the bird; and S.E. was able to observe and audit well (still without binos) because F. was moving across my line of sight.

F. continued to boom. The foreign bird didn’t reply. F. produced almost a boom per step for about thirty yards.

S.E. decided to blunder quietly after F. (To ‘blunder quietly’ is an accurate expression if you’re wearing gumboots.) S.E. observed the foreign bird moving quietly through the gums. Quite close, actually. No confrontation. No further vocalisations. (To get ‘into’ an interaction among emus is a cool and rare thing.)

So, in closing: we are unsure:

was the interloper ‘sounding out’ Felicity/the birds in the house-clearing with this less-than-usual call? F. reacted with another less-than-usual mode of vocalisation, this 'boom-per-step' model, which was accompanied by the raised ruff and head-held-high-and-in-one-direction stare that we have seen at other times: definitely hostile.



Otherwise, citizens: F. and N. seem to be present here more often now. Dark and Pushy haven’t turned up today. It’s been a little while since we saw M.F. and Audacious. Haven’t seen Alpha Chick.

S.E.

I'm willing to bet that the interloper was another female.. probably checking to see if there was anyone around..

Felicity's reaction certainly suggests she knew it was another female (would she have reacted with hostility if it were a lone male?)

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Gee, Yinepu. I'm impressed. I 'thought' I heard a male's call -- it wasn't a 'boom.' But my logic is just the same as yours: I doubt that Felicity would have hit the hook that hard over a male!

I frankly confess that the Vocalisations Project is enormous, far beyond my meagre capacities. It could take years -- and quality equipment -- to 'pin down' those calls that we humans can't easily identify as male or female.

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Who is this Speckles Emu person anyway?

Well, I’m glad you asked – and apologies to long-term readers for the repetition.

At the end of winter 2012, Greedy Emu’s consort, Boy Emu, hatched five chicks, and hit the trail. Greedy turned up about a month later with a new consort: Speckles Emu.

Then an odd thing happened: for whatever reason, Greedy and Speckles split up – but not until Speckles had learned the Yumminess of People Food! He would have been about ‘tame25,’ which means he’d come quite close to you in order to get his share of wheat.

‘Kay, then, a couple of months later, a breeding-pair turns up here; and we twigged that it was Speckles Emu and his new consort, Sarah Emu.

Now, about eight months later, Speckles and Sarah are back; and that’s noteworthy for a number of reasons:

we want all the data we can, including mortality among wild emus. The list of birds that give us that long-term info is short indeed: Eric, Number One, Greedy, Felicity, (Mrs. Eric?).

Well then, how old is Eric? We can’t know exactly; but he was a double-alpha bird when S.E. arrived five years ago, and he had his neck scars then. So, I ruckon he was at least four or five; but to be academically accurate, we’ll assume he was only two, the absolute minimum age he could have been. So, Eric is seven by ‘academic’ measure, and ten by our guess.
Eric’s consort (or vice versa) is/was Mrs. Eric the Emu. Readers, we haven’t seen her for about fourteen months. Mrs. Eric is a source of data because she is/was a long-term consort, and we were thus able to observe her.

Next are the three chicks that S.E. tamed – Eric’s 2008 clutch. We’ve lost one. Of the other two, Greedy would have died except I ‘sequestered’ her – so that’s an insight into mortality. I don’t know how she injured her foot, but she did. Several years later, she had another serious illness. (‘Serious’ is different here, readers: no vet; usually no chance of ‘sequestration’; result: an injured bird is killed by foxes or its fellows.)

So, Greedy is lucky to be alive – and at this second, we aren’t even sure if she is alive. We haven’t seen here for eight months.

Next, Felicity: she’s had one significant injury; but she’s alive and well and present.

‘Kay, now Speckles (and Sarah): we’ve just listed all the long-timer emua. It may be that we have observed the passage of hundreds of birds in the observation area; but those birds give us data on only certain things. Speckles (and Sarah), in that they have returned to the house-clearing (and done so as a breeding-pair, and done so in mating-season!), thus now become members of that small group of longer-term-observed birds.



finally: vocalisations: S.E. notes that Speckles – the male -- is the dominant partner; and he quite clearly ‘leads’ the vocalisations. So, again we ask: ‘Well, okay, the females fight for partners – but does that mean that the females are the dominant partners overall?’ Our data says ‘not necessarily!’

[and S.E. heard another type of call from Speckles this morning. There are so many!!]

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Little Catch-Up Report:

There is no project at present – but I know that some readers are paying attention, and there’s a fire in the living room ‘cause I had visitors. So:

my binos have come home. We can now positively identify the breeding-pairs in orbit.

S.E. made a positive i.d. of Speckles and Sarah about a fortnight ago, but he’s not even sure if it’s them that have been fussin’ with F. and N. at the lilly pilly tree in recent days.

F. and N. have been in a much ‘tighter’ orbit in recent days. By reading the posts from Mating-Season in Australia, we know that matings may begin any time.

Felicity is holding her own, but only just, I feel – and a chunk of that is home-team advantage. On the positive side, her consortship with Noddy seems well-established.

Several times, just by coincidence, S.E. has been outside when F. and N. have emerged from the gums. (They have been favouring a roosting-area on the west, over by Meadow One.) Felicity comes out first, with Noddy in trail; and, as she takes a bee-line to the lilly pilly tree (alpha-bird food, guys!!), she ‘lowers’ her ruff, then begins to quietly boom, then has a bit of a sideways walk.
It’s satisfying that we can, at this point, fairly clearly comprehend most of what is going on.

As I said, S. and S. were sighted; and as I note above, there has been a wild breeding-pair here every morning, at first light, for at least ten days. (S.E. has been off-base, chasing doctors in the Big Smoke. So, no observations at all for several days.)

Greedy is worth mention here:

‘accommodation’ is probably the more usual mode for breeding-pairs holding territory – that is, elementally, the female holding some territory around the nest. It may be that Greedy is kickin’ *** all over the place; but that’s not normal, that’s Greedy. Most females – clearly including Felicity – are not in this class.

This means that Felicity is doin’ okay: she has an established consort. She is getting good tucker in the house-clearing and the lilly pilly (and from S.E.). She is holding territory (and S.E. has picked up just a little data on the inter-territory calls: the ‘network’ is developing. I heard three different birds in the scrub while sitting in the dark on the way to town).
So, S.E. will post just a sentence or two on ‘the other’ breeding-pair(s): is it S. and S.? or S. and S. and another pair(s)?

Vignette on Vocalisations:

S.E. was lying perfectly still in the garden, had been for an hour. Heard a single call. Wasn’t even sure it was a call. Listened carefully. Heard another, just as quiet. What came to mind is a better way of representing the data on vocalisations, as a play script. This would give the necessary related data, such as ‘Wild emu hears S.E.’

Such a ‘script’ would look like this:

“[Breeding-pair moving past the house-clearing to the north.]

Male: gurk.

[No female reply]”

Does anyone remember the photo of the wild-emu tracks in the mud at the dam we visited over near Stinky Creek? The fact of the tracks gave us a tiny but reliable insight into a few seconds of that bird’s life: it approached a water source, unalarmed; found it too muddy for safe negotiation; and withdrew.

Well, the two tiny calls can be extrapolated into a similar insight. The two birds (we heard only one call; but we assume there was another) passed the house-clearing. They may have spotted S.E. – probably did – but they sounded unalarmed.

We conclude that either the calls served to bring my presence to the attention of the other bird(s), or that it was the most basic sort of ‘on the move’ ‘touching base’ call.

Minimal, isn’t it!! Lovely!!

S.E.

 

[yinepu]

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Got binos.

Positive sighting Speckles and Sarah.

Felicity and Noddy sharing clearing. F. nominally in charge.

Gonna have a look to the west for F. and N. roost – which is where the nest will be if it happens.

K.B., apologies, I forgot to mention Mystery Female and Audacious: no recent sightings. They seem to no longer be in orbit here.

Other breeding-pairs? Details to follow.

Alpha Chick not spotted for some time.

s.e.

 

[kbgh]

Perhaps MF took Audacious to her home turf. Let's hope he shows up in the spring with a clutch of chicks in tow.

Could Alpha chick been driven off by Felicity? After-all, in her mind, he may have been an invader on her home turf.

K.