Planet Rothschildi

[Tame Emu Guy]

Some never-before stuff this morning:

apparently, readers, there are gurrks and there are gurrks!

S.E. was sitting in the sun, by the house. F. and N. were grazing on their sweet spot. Felicity uttered a ‘territorial call.’ There was one wild bird visible, but S.E. didn’t notice it until it ran off.

Within a minute, there were at least six birds audible; but the calls were at all points of the compass. The birds didn’t seem interested in entering the clearing. Most unusual.

Then I heard a gurk that sounded like any other gurk to me, but both Felicity and Noddy responded immediately. They snapped straight into a splendid double-barrel ‘sweeping’ manoeuvre.* That is, full ruff, and fully sideways ( and walking in step too, which was surely a coincidence; but it looked great!).

There was also an odd thing that I’d like your comments on:

Felicity’s body posture during this sweep included something we’ve never seen: her tail was raised in the ‘mating-position’ -- ???

The calls continued, both male and female. Most of them sounded like ‘gurk’ to S.E., but they produced absolutely no affect on F. and N., who grazed complacently as it all went on on the edges of their turf.

Now, at this point, guys, I had visitors due. So, I forced the issue: I had to walk down to Meadow Two, to get a little thing done. (crawdads!) A male and a female were both calling heartily in the strip of scrub between the house-clearing and the Meadow as S.E. headed down there.

I caught sight of a female, who drifted off. Then a wonderful string of really loud and spirited gurrks came from the opposite side: cool!! I was smack between a communicating male and female.

Then I spotted the male, and snuggled in behind a tree. He knew I was there, but – this is a first ever, readers – decided that passing me at close range, to get to the female, was worth the risk. (Note that this was a 'tame00' bird, readers, not a bird with any experience of the house-clearing.)

He advanced until he was so close I could see his breath smoking in the cold morning air. He was gurrking to beat the band, and passed me no more than thirty feet away.

All this time, the other male and females were calling from different directions.

So, Yinepu: all gurks are not equal: they can mean nothing; they can snap a breeding-pair into territorial defence.


Note on the ‘sweet spot:

it’s a patch of pasture, guys, that has grass and clover and at least two other species growing lushly intertwined. Well, perhaps there’s an experiment worth trying for those of you who have captive birds on pasture: Felicity and Noddy absolutely love this little patch. They shuffle back and forth between it and the lilly pilly, hour after hour, even though there are acres of other pasture all around them.


*One of the simple limitations of our situation, readers, is that you can only watch one thing at a time through the binos. You can’t even easily ‘swing’ from bird to bird because you need to re-focus as you go. So, S.E. may hear many birds; but S.E. can only watch one bird at a time.

While he’s doing that, other birds may be in plain sight, walking through the gums on the edge of the clearing – but by the time you re-focus – or even re-locate, a constant necessity – then you can’t tell which other bird right behind you is doing what to whom.

Thus, it’s possible to have to watch a dozen or a hundred different territorial spats before you can piece together any fair composite picture of the birds’ overall behaviour in such situations.

The relocations often require slow movements. So, whole chunks of the action ‘fall through the cracks’ even during the most disciplined observations.

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

[S.E.’s Internet functional soon. Photo fest!!]

Felicity and Noddy seem – S.E. hasn’t observed enough – to be sneaking into the gums around mid-morning. Otherwise, the same ‘holding-pattern’: roosting here most nights; grazing here most days.

Noddy vocalises at night -- ??

Noddy clearly prefers lilly pillies to wheat -- ??

Speckles and Sarah here today.

And there was a foreign breeding-pair here as well. S.E. is becoming surer about the birds getting darker during winter: the male was dark, guys!

(Great! Another variable in the business of identifying specific emus: ‘dark’ bird in winter becomes . . . some other bird in summer!)

Felicity and Noddy choofed off with the foreign pair, and returned an hour or so later -- ??

S.E.

 

[yinepu]

[S.E.’s Internet functional soon. Photo fest!!]

Felicity and Noddy seem – S.E. hasn’t observed enough – to be sneaking into the gums around mid-morning. Otherwise, the same ‘holding-pattern’: roosting here most nights; grazing here most days.

Noddy vocalises at night -- ??

Noddy clearly prefers lilly pillies to wheat -- ??

Speckles and Sarah here today.

And there was a foreign breeding-pair here as well. S.E. is becoming surer about the birds getting darker during winter: the male was dark, guys!

(Great! Another variable in the business of identifying specific emus: ‘dark’ bird in winter becomes . . . some other bird in summer!)

Felicity and Noddy choofed off with the foreign pair, and returned an hour or so later -- ??

S.E.

lol.. we all have our favorite foods.. no reason why they should be any different!

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Morning, Yinepu!

Yes indeed. We are liberals here: to each their favourite grain.

I mention it because E.S. mentioned a ‘pasture-fed’ bird having some preferences. The experiment here yielded such a clear result.

Also, some locals have explained that emus should always love wheat – especially in winter – because it is such a source of protein.

S.E. gotta go to town. Will audit down by the river. Heard both F. and N. calling around an hour after dark.

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Here’s a thing:

Felicity and Noddy were observed here at deep dusk on Friday, and that follows the pattern of recent weeks. S.E. assumes therefore, that, after dark, they were roosting where they have been for weeks, over in their ‘s.w. corner.’

[Photos and text coming shortly: Internet him still unwell.]

So, anyway, about a half an hour after dark, some local lads came barrelling down the driveway, horn a-blazing.

We’ve asked: do emus move at night?

Next morning (with one victim still asleep on the couch, but the fire still roaring), S.E. was auditing from the horizontal position in the bedroom bunker. He’d heard no vocalisations during the night. There were none at dawn. Most unusual.

S.E. slipped out, and saw Noddy reconnoitring from the gums on the north side of the clearing.

S.E. can’t be sure, but the little info I have suggests that the birds may have ‘relocated’ after dark – in other words, bolted in panic. There is no prehistoric equivalent of loud noises and lights during the night.

(The moon was almost full, but had it risen? No, I think it was still pretty dark.)

The other oddity is that neither Felicity nor Noddy vocalised until about ten a.m., when the last guests left: no calls during the night, no calls before dawn, no calls while foraging at first light under the lilly pilly.

This is all most inconclusive – but S.E. did notice it.


Here’s one for Yinepu:

a wild bird is only safe for a short period each day, and that period is the last half hour of dusk:

night-time predators aren’t about yet; the day’s territorial shenanigans are over, and other birds have withdrawn to the vicinity of their roosts; daytime predators have also finished hunting. It’s a ‘neutral moment,’ readers.

Well, it’s a fine thing to audit a breeding-pair’s calls in that final twenty minutes. The pair will, typically, cruise quietly about the house-clearing, having a final little snack of yummy grass. The vocalisations at this time are noteworthy: quiet and relaxed.

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

S.E. still suspects that some present behaviours are nest-building behaviours. F. and N. have been further observed standing together quietly in the gums, fussing about.

Felicity continues to be uncharacteristically uninterested in her wheat, preferring lilly pillies. She does also continue to be a mite skittish.

S.E. doesn’t pretend to understand.

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Something Going On:

‘Kay, campers. Here’s a sort of ‘broad update’:

although S.E. is not ‘formally’ observing, we are still getting trickles of data.

As some long-term campers know, we observed a breeding-pair last winter. They mated; the female laid; the male incubated and hatched a clutch. That data is on ‘Mating-Season in Australia,’ the ‘first half’ of the year of observations.

S.E. just popped back to that thread, and checked the late-June, 2012 posts. He found this:

‘about a hundred yards away in the gum trees, Boy Emu has been fussing about while standing in exactly the same spot. If I didn’t know better, I’d assume he’s building a nest.’
‘Mating-Season in Australia,’ 2/7/2012

Within a fortnight of this date last year, Boy Emu was nesting.

So, what we’re doing today is comparing the chronology of Greedy-and-Boy-Emu behaviour in late June 2012 with the behaviour of Felicity and Noddy in late June 2013.

This morning, for at least the third time, S.E. saw F. and N. standing together at a spot in the gums – ‘fussing about,’ I’d call it. (Right out the front, but screened from the house. S.E. reckons too close to the front drive.)

They were observed fussing about in a different spot a couple of weeks ago.

Last year, we noted a sort of don’t-want-to-be-watched behaviour on Greedy and Boy Emu's part.

Felicity and Noddy are much shyer than G. and B.E., and that may be a real problem for us.

It’s also important to note that we had to piece together what happened in 2012 from guesses, snippets of observation, some good observations, and some information from BYC folk. (Special thanks to Emu Hugger).

Of special note is a Youtube video titled ‘finding an emu nest,’ which explains a fact that never seems to turn up in Emu Factsheets:

it is not the case that the female lays a number of eggs fairly fast, and then the male plonks himself down on those.

Rather, there is a ‘pre-nest.’ It seems that there’s a period of some days during which the female lays an egg a day (or maybe three eggs in two days). The male hides these until there are about five eggs to sit on, which makes his ‘evolutionary investment’ – sitting for sixty days in the pouring rain – worthwhile.

So, when S.E. spotted F. and N. in the gums this morning, he slipped across to the wood shed, from which he could observe.

F. and N. saw him, and sidled out of the gums.

And what followed was wonderfully inconclusive:

they drifted about fifty yards across the pasture. Noddy stayed in the open, and half-heartedly grazed. Felicity walked into the gums in another spot, and just stood there. Then she moseyed to yet another spot, and stood there. She didn’t graze. Just stood there.

In closing, the possibilities are:

One: nothing is gonna happen (but that’s not what the ‘tight orbit’ etc. suggest).
Two: the matings and consequent egg-layings will start any day now.
Three: the matings have begun, but not the egg-layings.
Four: the egg-laying has begun, but we haven’t observed it.

Personally, I reckon Two or perhaps Three.

Please feel free to offer your thoughts.

Go, Felicity Emu!!

[Otherwise, rather fewer birds about. The house-clearing hasn’t been a real gathering-point, as it was last year. Speckles and Sarah visit irregularly. Audacious and Mystery Female haven’t been seen for a while. Felicity remains uncharacteristically uninterested in her wheat ration. F. and N. have been in a tight tight orbit for weeks now, sometimes spending ten hours a day in an area just a couple of hundred yards square.]


S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Definitely Something Going On!!

[‘Kay, we remain in Internet semi-dysfunction mode. Patience, guys.]
Now, it won’t help to follow the pair about. I have been gardening/sneaking into positions to observe (like a nail hole in the chicken shed).

# the pair are eating lilly pillies, but just not grazing.
# an odd vocalisation from Noddy earlier, and some sort of minor display.
# We have twice seen Felicity on her knees.
# Another time, she stood stock still for minutes (hole in the chook-shed wall . . . ). It really did seem to S.E. that she was holding her toosh high.
# Overall, the pair has been in this mode for some hours now.

It strikes me to say that Felicity knows her part, but Noddy can't figure it out.

S.E. going back to the garden.

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Fine clear morning. Fabulous moonlight last night. The breeding-pair arrived early. Felicity quite vocal. Quite uninterested in wheat. Barely a peck (!)

Interloper female appeared, and driven off more aggressively than of late.

Even though S.E. listens at length to F.’s calls, he can’t distinguish variations that Noddy clearly can. Noddy remained under the lilly pilly while Felicity was slow-motion-confronting the interloper, calling steadily as she went. Then Noddy broke straight into a trot, to go to help her. Noddy obviously understood some nuance.

[There’s a squabble of kookaburras at it right in sight of the key board, and practically shaking the windows with their calls. Ring-necked parrots and a crow are polishing off F. and N.’s unloved wheat. Silvereyes and red wattle birds are sporting in the gum by the house. (S.E. promises to introduce readers to this particular tree. Most non-country Australians don’t know that there are many many species of flowering gums.)]

We now automatically start diagramming the recent movements of any birds that we sight. So, for this interloper, it went something like:

it’s less than thirty minutes after dawn. The bird is arriving from the south east. So, it probably didn’t roost more than four or five hundred yards away, in that direction. It might well have been audible late yesterday afternoon. Does it know the lilly pilly is here? That is, is it a ‘travelling bird’? or is it a gate-crasher?

And . . . call forth praises, loyal readers. It is once again real-estate-inspection-preparation time. Thus, S.E. needs to be about the house for several weeks (It’s a five-bedroom house, and I go about the cleaning very slowly. Wa ha ha.)

Our method today shall be to peek and peek and peek.

The problem is that they’re so sharp-eyed. Remember that I have described some birds as ‘moseyers,’ that is, they always mosey out of sight if they know you can see them. Well, F. and N. seem to be in a mosey mode. They want to be here at the clearing, but they don’t want S.E. watching them.

Yesterday, for example, S.E. wound up lying in the gum litter behind a tree, watching Felicity way over by the old sheep yards. Every time I raised the binos, to watch her, she’d be staring straight at me.

Reports during the day, as the action progresses. Quiet booming and gurking going on as we type.

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Only got snippety observations of F. and N. today. Didn’t see (what I thought was) the mating-behaviour of yesterday. However, we still have the feeling that Felicity knows what she’s doing; but Noddy is wandering about eating lilly pillies. Both their appetites are – apart from lilly pilly – muted.

S.E.