Planet Rothschildi

[yinepu]

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Morning, all!!
Planet Rothschildi is functional for the second – though without photos.

However . . . if citizens will bear with a photo-less model for a while, S.E. promises a photo fest when the Internet is fully functional again.

S.E. has twigged to a thing: the first place where he saw F. and N. doing their fussing about was just by the fig, and I should have noted that. The fig tree is Felicity’s home-est territory, has been since she was a chick.

(The photo to the left of the post is her and her sister at about that time. The fig is visible behind them. Eric used to chase her under the tree, but she’d get in among the low branches, and he couldn’t follow her.)

Well, last night, they roosted there, not in ‘their’ spot over on the s.w. corner. Vocalisations last night.

Just a minute ago, I went out to feed them. They remain uninterested in wheat, but keen on the berries.

Then I thought that we’d have just a peek over at last night’s roost – ‘Which aisle were they in?’ thought S.E.

Well!! Their little emu tracks were perfectly visible in the long grass. That’s a first. We now have one more type of no-actual-emu-present information-gathering.

S.E. had just a peek in the aisle(s). Didn’t find anything – but could smell emu. I’ve smelt emu a few times of late. Just a hint.



S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Big-Time Gurking

F. and N. just snapped into sweep mode – interlopers?

Felicity has headed off into the trees. Noddy is back for berries. (We wonder if there’s a little evolutionary voice in his head: ‘Just one more berry, dude – it’s a long way to Spring!!’)

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Longest string of male calls – gurks – I’ve ever heard.

Easily. At least a hundred in a row. From Noddy. Over in ‘their’corner.

A foreign breeding-pair cruised through (and other birds were audible), and F. and N. . . .

this puzzles me, campers: Felicity arced up as soon as she heard them – but then she spent an hour grazing with them! It is a not uncommon behaviour.

Perhaps there’s a give-and-take modality here: Felicity says, ‘Nah! If push comes to shove, this is my patch’ – but then, having established that, co-grazing is somehow socially positive. Comments??

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

S.E. reports. S.E. doesn’t pretend to understand:

Gee, campers . . . I can’t quite put my finger on it.

The breeding-pair is undoubtedly behaving oddly:

they are grazing far far less than usual (but lots of lilly pillies).

They keep . . . hmmmm . . . they are moving in unusual patterns. They sort of separate, and re-unite; separate, re-unite.

They drift into and out of the gums at the points I’ve noticed: s.w. corner, and by the fig tree.

Vocalisations? S.E. is unsure . . . but . . . there seem to be different patterns. Very very hard to pin, this one.

This last one is really slender: Felicity looked positively . . . ummm . . . abstracted just a while ago, after she and Noddy re-appeared from behind some trees (and her tail feathers were all rucked up -- ??).


S.E.’s gonna take a wild guess, and say that they have either started mating, or will very shortly.

Also, had a look at both roosts (while F. and N. were away, tee hee): nothing unusual.

All opinions welcome.

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Good morning, viewers. Welcome to Complete-Befuddlement News at Nine:

‘something’ is clearly still going on – I just can’t figure out what it is!

So, F. and N. turned up at first light, and tucked into sultanas and wheat and lilly pillies and grass as usual. So far, so good.

Then I saw Noddy standing just in the gums, doing a little of that fussin’-about thing. Felicity, meanwhile, was meandering up the drive. (‘Separate’)

S.E. drifted up a little later, and audited: two females up near the front fence: one inside and one out -- ??

Some time later, the pair returned to the lilly pilly tree. (‘re-unite’)

Then it got strange:

Felicity, guys, spent fifteen or more minutes in a mode I’ve never seen before. She wandered around near the house/lily pilly tree, emitting quiet random strings of four or five booms. Noddy remained under the lily pilly. Although S.E. can’t quite put his finger on it, these vocalisations are somehow different.

At one point, she seemed to be ‘eagle-eyes-ing’ towards a couple of compass points – but no other birds were audible (though we know from experience that the one we heard earlier may well still be nearby).

She seemed at another point to be looking for something on the ground, pecking about around the outbuildings. Not grazing, but pecking here and there.

What was noticeable also was that Noddy wasn’t vocalising in response (just a couple).

So, Felicity didn’t seem to be uttering territorial calls, and she didn’t seem to be talking to Noddy. So, Yinepu, here is yet another suite of vocalisations!

S.E. notes also that Felicity was pretty much ignoring S.E., who was sitting, watching-while-pretending-not-to-be-watching.

Then . . . Felicity drifted off into ‘their’ corner (s.w.); Noddy sort of followed: stopped to graze in the clearing just by the gums.

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Brief post this morning. Still no photos:

Same pattern. F. and N. zipped into ‘their corner’ right after brekkie. S.E. heard, again, a really long long string of gurks from Noddy.

There was a foreign pair here yesterday, and we observed them for some time. S.E. thought it might have been Audacious and Mystery Female. These birds may well be here today (because they were here at dusk yesterday).

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

‘Mexican Standoff’

[A little break from cleaning]

S.E. just had the fortune to observe a textbook Mexican standoff. But first, here’s a definition of a similar behaviour, a ‘bounce’:

a bounce, readers, is when a female or a breeding-pair aggressively confront interloper birds, and drive them from their (immediate) territory. This may include ‘escorting’ them a short distance.

A Mexican standoff is a lesser form of the same behaviour, and it goes like this:

the home team sees or hears the interlopers (S.E. is still trying to figure this one out.) In this case, a fine breeding pair, one with orange eyes, and the other with a distinctive covering of ‘sooty’ feathers on its neck, a sort of thinnish ‘down.’

The home team then begins to mosey towards the interlopers as though there is absolutely no reason whatsoever in the world why they are headed in that direction. The inaction includes pauses to crop grass, and to scratch tooshes.

Meanwhile, the interlopers sidle out of the gums. I swear, campers, you can see the cogs going around in their heads as they size the situation up: can we get to the lilly pilly? will she attack us outright? can we defeat her? them?

The home-team female then fires the starting gun by raising some ruff – not a lot – and uttering low- to mid-level booms. She stands with one foot behind the other, staring resolutely at the intruders.

[If the interlopers disappear from sight, guys, you can tell where they are from the direction of the home-team female’s gaze.]

What happens next – and S.E. is utterly ignorant of how the birds gauge each other’s capacities – shows whether the action will be a bounce or a Mexican standoff. The interlopers assiduously do nothing: they check their emails; they straighten their ties; they check to see if there’s a bottle of dishwashing liquid under the kitchen sink; they graze; they scratch their tooshes.

And somehow . . . they are moving towards that, whatchamacallit, lily pilly tree.

The home-team female remains stock still exactly between tree and interlopers. Then she vocalises and advances just a little.

The foreigners drift closer – and at this point, even that dumbo Supreme Emu can sense the tension.

This is what happened this time:

the interloper in front (no calls on their part, so we don’t know the sexes) reached the Invisible Line. Then she did a thing that is hard to describe: it’s like dropping into a crouch without bending your knees. The neck is extended; the body sort of flattens. It’s a classical pre-attack signal. If you ever see Eric the Emu or Greedy do it at you, run to the nearest slit trench.

The foreign bird did this, guys, then . . .
. . .
scratched its toosh, and didn’t turn away (which would be a sign of defeat) . . . but somehow ended up facing in the other direction.

[The home-team male, all this time, flickers between a supportive posture, and an ummm-what-Yummy-grass!! neutrality. As noted above, there is a call that causes him to ‘snap’ into bounce mode; but we can’t identify it yet.]

A half an hour later, all four birds are within twenty feet of where they were when the balloon went up. The home-team female remains standing on ‘the line,’ facing the threat.

These are among my favourite observations.

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Here is the chronology of the wild emu’s mating-season. It’s a draft. Please offer comments. The things in italics are the things we are unsure of:

# around December (mid-summer here): birds start looking for partners.

# around March and April, autumn rains begin. Pasture becomes plentiful. Breeding-pairs are by now established.
Shmoozing and flocking-up begins: the birds move broadly. (We are still puzzled by the apparent disappearance of males with chicks and lone birds.)

Pairs start staking out a territory, perhaps the female’s home turf (and the male will leave with the chicks for his home turf the day the hatch finishes).

# by mid-autumn, the pairs are still grazing on different pastures (‘major-and-minor-territories’); but they have reduced their ‘orbit.’ They may mate at this point. (We have an observation.)
Early matings/layings are undertaken by more powerful and experienced pairs.

# by late autumn, the staking-out of territory is almost finished.

The breeding-pairs are now operating from an area about a quarter of a mile square. They may roost ‘away’ for a night. They may go schmoozing for hours, at some distance; but their general orbit is much tighter. Nesting-behaviour begins.

# by the first day of winter (seasonal winter . . . not calendar winter), some females are laying, and males are stashing the eggs in pre-nests. Within days, the males are nesting on the nest proper.

The females/some females begin ‘secondary matings’ with other males. These males are ‘second string’ – or they’d have been in breeding-pairs that secured territories in the ‘first round.’

# by mid-winter, the amount of night-time vocalisation is increasing, and the pre-dawn ‘conversations’ between males and females are underway. If you hear such conversations here at my place, you know there will be wild birds in the house-clearing about an hour after dawn (they make appointments!).

This is a ‘third round’ of bargaining: females want to increase their chances by laying a further round of eggs before the season ends; ‘third-string’ males are struggling to get into the mating-game at all.

# still mid-winter: in the mornings, the females of territories exchange warning calls with the females of adjacent territories.

# the female attends the hatching (this one is an upset – but it’s what we observed last winter: Greedy assiduously guarded the hatching of her chicks!)

# in late winter, in places where the micro-climate provides a sort of ‘extended winter,’ there are males just undertaking incubation while other male’s clutches are hatching.





Okay, citizens, imagine that you are looking down on my place from a mile or so above it. The house-clearing is a postage stamp.
We are focussed this morning on all the other pairs and their territories.

S.E.’s wild guess, guys, is that a territory is a bit smaller than the books suggest – at least around here. It’s perhaps as little as five hundred yards between nesting males. Last season, we stumbled on a male and his clutch just that distance from the clearing.

Looking back at this point, with information about roosts that we have gleaned since, S.E. reckons that that male and chicks were very close to where they’d hatched: S.E. smelt the bird before he saw it, and there were roost blessings visible.

We also have data from audits: the females sounded about a half a mile away, but when S.E. tracked one before dawn, it was – as the crow flies – a mite closer.

Also, when we walked to the river before dawn, we heard females at regular intervals.

So, from on high, you can see Noddy sitting quietly on the ground, warming his beloved big green eggs. Over in The 400, just inside the fence, is another nesting male, likewise sitting quietly.

If you put an ‘X’ everywhere there is a nesting male, you realise that there is a vast pattern – it’s a continent, readers – of nesting males.

We guess that the usual factors govern the ‘demographics’ of the area chosen: food and water and pasture and fences (and presence of inhabited areas). So, there’d be a ‘flow’ to the X’s marking the birds’ positions.

Perhaps, for example, there’s a swathe of them just north of the fence line of the National Park behind Oudman’s, but many fewer south of that line – and those on the south side would be in the better spots in that area.

So, as winter progresses, S.E. will try to post just a little data about this reality, upon which we only managed to touch last year because S.E simply hadn’t really figured it out at that point.

Meanwhile, let’s spare a thought for the tens of thousands of Noddies all sitting patiently on their nest on their spot in the immense patchwork of female-commanded territories.

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Morning, Citizens!

Still in holding-pattern. F. and N. pop into the gums every morning after brekkie. Today is (seasonal) mid-winter. S.E. is striving to maintain a balance between not watching . . . and actually seeing what’s going on.

Yesterday morning, Felicity headed off to the gums alone, and began booming. Noddy continued a-peck-peck-peckin’ at his lily pillies. Then he suddenly took to his heels, and ran all the way across to the spot in the gums where Felicity was -- ??

S.E.