Planet Rothschildi

[Tame Emu Guy]

Hey ya, K.B.!!

Conjecture is who we are!!

Yes, perhaps M.F. and A. have ‘withdrawn’ to a safer zone, but one that they can hold. S.E. will keep an eye out for them – they may well pass through.

And yes! Let’s wait and see if Audacious turns up with chicks (which would put him head-to-head with Eric!!). Above are some notes about the scarcity of long-term data. Well, the fact that Audacious is so recognisable may put him – and a clutch of his – in the class of long-term observees.

Wa ha ha -- K.B., Felicity is always driving Alpha Chick off!!

Remember S.E. moaning at length about ‘overheating’ the clearing here? Well, we can only guess about Alpha; but . . . his ‘depth of imprint’ here is pretty strong. Perhaps he sees Felicity as a threat to his territory!!

Good Report coming soon. S.E. thinks he knows where Noddy will roost.

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

[S.E. got a fire. Got ‘White Boy Blues.’]

S.E. travelled some back roads this afternoon. Fabulous emu country. We are experienced enough now, fellow travellers, to get a real feel for the emu country we’re lookin’ at: fences crossable? There were ‘islands’ of scrub. Crops. Some ‘natural’ pastures.
Saw a flock of six birds in a great paddock, perhaps a mile long, beside the road. Those birds must graze much of the day on (that) one pasture.

S.E. gumbooted about the clearing this morning. The photo below is of a track at the s.w. corner of the clearing, behind the GP shed. Felicity and Noddy cruise in and out here:



Remember the photos of the birds manoeuvring by the lilly pilly tree one morning? and the photo of F. coming across the clearing towards the lilly pilly? That was from this corner. We’ve also heard a female calling over there at night.

(I think S. and S. are operating out of the north and north west.)

So we did a little fieldwork. Just ‘blocked out’ a couple of aisles of gums, the ones just two and three and four away from the clearing.

Bingo! Here below is a roost blessing just thirty feet into the gums. There are both lilly pilly and wheat seeds in it. There are numbers of blessings like this visible in an area the size of a tennis court. It’s almost certainly F. and N. (and it’s the presence of the older/darker stool that clearly marks it as a roost pooh).

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

try later

 

[kbgh]

Let's hope the nest ends up near this roost. Then we can get some great data on a nesting male. (And you won't have to trudge too far from the house clearing).

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Hey ya, K.B.!! Now, longer-term readers get to tease you at this point: we already have data on a nesting male.

Goodness!! You’ve been a reader for nine or ten months!! You turned up last spring, just at the end of the ‘Mating-Season in Australia’ thread.

S.E. puddled about with a couple of small threads, then started ‘Planet Rothschildi.’ On the first thread – written during winter 2012 – Greedy’s consort, Boy Emu, incubated a clutch right out the front of the house.

But it’s not distance that the hardest part of gathering data. It’s the rain and cold.

We note here that that data is helping us figure out what is happening here today.

And indeed, the chain is even longer. For example, at just this time last year, the new and few citizens of M-S. i A. were reading S.E.’s blogs as S.E. himself wandered around (in the cold and rain . . . ) trying to figure out where the eggs were. Thankfully, E.H. and some other breeders knew enough about emu-nesting to be able to guide S.E., and then help with the arithmetic of the matings-then-‘pre-nest’-then-real-nest thing. It was a pretty groovy collaboration.

S.E.

 

[Ashburnham]

Cold and rain in WA!?

Mate - you should move to Gippsland. lol


xxxxx M

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Hey ya, Ashburnham!

Apparently there is a little-known sub-species of emu – dromaius novaehollandiae miamipoolsideus – that lives in the tropics of the southern U.S. No ornithologist has yet written a paper on how the members of this sub-species hold the pen while they sign their bar-service chits.

The United Nations has just cut me a check, and I’m off to observe them at length.

Supine Emu

 

[kbgh]

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

[Half-holiday today. The rest of the report above is coming, guys -- S.E. is having his modem re-calibrated.]


Here’s an interim report:

I spoke of ‘Stage Two.’ Yes!!!!

Both breeding-pairs were here all day yesterday, and S.E. watched them as he pottered about. He also had cause to walk to the far side of the Corridor, so he took a few photos.

So, neither pair was here the night before last. Both pairs were here at dusk last night. Only F. and N. turned up this morning.

S.E. is sure that neither pair roosted here on the night before last because he had an auditing-post set up before dawn the following morning. Within an hour of dawn, both pairs were here, and they both stayed here all day.

[And here in brackets: these are the favourite days of a tired old emu. There is little traffic on the road on a Sunday, so it’s quiet quiet quiet. The emus just drift about, grazing. Speckles even wandered a few feet into the back yard.]

Here are my thoughts:

well! Here is Greedy’s name yet again! We see that Something Different is happening here this mating-season, and I wonder if part of the difference relates to the personality of the two females.

Felicity is nominally in charge – but only nominally. Yesterday, for instance, Speckles actually got his beak into F. and N.’s wheat for several good scoffs before Felicity shooshed him off – not ‘flogged’ or ‘evicted.’ Just ‘shooshed.’

And . . . if these two couples are locked in mortal Darwinian combat (which is the ‘basic’ assumption, the ‘default position’), how come they spend hours and hours grazing together? A couple of times a day, Felicity ‘reminds’ Speckles who’s in charge (while Noddy does his potted-palm impersonation, and Sarah prances about at the back, going, ‘Kook kook kook’). Otherwise, they are peas in a pod.


So . . . Greedy and Felicity?? Is it possible, readers, that last season there was more action here, more birds passing though, because there were two females in residence? I haven’t seen a wild emu for days and days.

And Yinepu, if there’s any validity to this thought, we need to think about how girl-power and girl-availability-for-mating are expressed in vocalisations!

Next, ‘Stage Two, Yes!!!!’ The forthcoming report introduces you to the s.w. corner of the clearing. S.E. observed both pairs right into dusk yesterday evening. S. and S. withdrew to the n.w., and F. and N. slipped off to the s.w.

Let us observe and enjoy then, readers!! S.E. is not observing as such, but it’s easy to keep an eye on F. and N.
The situation is that we have a breeding-pair spending more days on their home turf – which the house-clearing clearly now is; and the female of the pair is just beginning to vocalise at night; and the pair is clearly favouring an area hard by the clearing; and mating-season has certainly begun.

[There’s a beautiful big kingfisher – a kookaburra – sitting right out the window. They’re chubby killers, and they can fly straight upwards. It’s something to see.]


And Now for Something Completely Different:

Last night, I was thinking about the power structures in the breeding-dynamic of the emu species.
So, the females fight for access to the males, and breed with multiple males, which we normally assume means that the females are the ‘pivot’ of the species.

But think, readers, about groupies at the stage door. The members of the Rolling Stones or Boy Band 304X-17 don’t fight for access to the groupies. They sit back and let the groupies fight for access to them.

I found myself thinking about the way the males peck the females on the back of the neck during copulation. The female offers her vent – so she’s in charge at that point. However, there’s a smidgeon of authority in the pecking.

Now continue this selfish-male train of thought. Suppose he’s thinking, " ‘Kay, I sit about looking genetically superior; the chickees fight for access to me; I mate with one that I have let choose me; she delivers the eggs; and after that, I don’t care much what she does: I have a quorum of eggs. I really don’t care if not all of them are mine – there’s plenty of room for another egg – and henceforth, I, the male, am in total control of my genetic destiny because I am the sole parent. Go, me!!! "

Please feel free to post your thoughts on this.

Finally, is S.E. imagining it, or has Felicity been rather flighty of late? prancing about as though she hasn’t seen S.E. for months?

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

[Truly minimal reports: S.E. cold and unwell, but interested.]

Good report coming, but Internet faulty. Can’t upload photos.

Felicity and Noddy just seen going to roost at dusk. We now have them pinned to an area about one hundred feet square.

F. and N. also ‘tightly’ in orbit, five or six nights a week here at the clearing, and grazing here most of the day.

The vocalisations on these ‘at-home days’ are truly minimal if no foreign birds intervene. There is an exchange at dawn, part of which is almost certainly Felicity getting S.E. out of bed: she knows to walk around the house, and vocalise.

S. and S. not seen today. Their orbit is larger.

One foreign bird here yesterday. Sometimes observations at the house-clearing can be quite high quality: there were more emus vocalising than S.E. could see, and Felicity was, briefly, in what was clearly a defence mode: ruffed up and booming. Otherwise, no more than a few kooks and grunts all day long.


It occurs to me to say, readers, that we were lucky last year to cotton on to where Boy Emu actually roosted. S.E. saw Greedy and B.E. at the nest site because he was assiduously observing. My point is that ‘it’ will almost certainly happen this month if it does happen. If Noddy nests away from the area under observation, we will have a hell of a time finding him. Our best chance is to keep an eye out for nest-building behaviour.

We learned last year that matings are not frequent. It may have been a real stroke of luck that S.E. was able to report two matings – particularly since one of the pairs roosted elsewhere.

Oh, and who recalls the wild birds that I have seen a number of times on the soak on the way to town? Well, we are now sure enough that they are pets, or at least 'paddock emus.' There is a dam in a field a few hundred yards from the soak, and I see the same birds at that dam. Let us try to eventually find the farmhouse on that farm, and visit those birds.

[And we gotta visit Aisle Five and Aisle Seven at the refuge. They'll be yearlings!!]



S.E.