Planet Rothschildi

[kbgh]

First a question.

Do you want to keep the interlopers around or just see them on occasion?

What about B.E. and the chicks?

You failed to mention Mrs Eric?

Feed enough to keep your favorites and the 2 "pets" around.

What the hell are "sultanas" and " brumbies"

Kerry

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Hi, K.B.!

‘Do you want to keep the interlopers around or just see them on occasion?’

This is the crux of the matter: I don’t have nearly that much control. There exists in the house-clearing a ‘dynamic.’ It is multi-faceted. Part is ‘natural.’ Part concerns the two birds that are ‘my’ tame birds. Part concerns several birds that are ‘second-class citizens’: for example, they become a little tame when they come here in the company of a tame bird. Part concerns the availability of high-quality food that I don’t provide. (fruit trees, etc.)

If you throw down a handful of wheat, a single handful, it will be eaten by the highest-ranking of those birds present. The more birds turn up, the more complex feedings become.


Mrs. Eric was Eric’s consort for several years that I saw. We don’t know if they are still an item, K.B., because Eric is now parenting, that is, separated from his consort whether they re-unite later or not.
And to put it academically: we have no data on B.E. at this time (Though other readers and I are paying attention to this. We followed his incubation and hatching, and would love to know where he is.)

Sultanas are the cousins of raisins and currants. Brumbies are mustangs.

It boils down to looking into the eyes of a one-foot-high emu chick, and saying, 'No! get away! You don't belong here!'

Supreme Emu

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

and speaking of chicks,

I forgot to tease U.S. readers this morning:

Eric's two chicks are 'operational' critters. No neat ratite-pellet feeder for them. They were wet with dew when they arrived this morning. It was a plimsoll line around their bodies, right up to their bellies, and actually dripping of their chest feathers.. Their food is taller than they are. They are constantly and literally ploughing through it.

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Fruit-Season is Begun!!


I watched Eric jumping up yesterday to score the one-quarter-grown ‘early’ plums. (The tree is an early-plum tree.) This is one of the three or four major markers of the emu life-cycle hereabouts.

[Eric Plus just emerged from the gums. It’s still pretty early – which means that Eric Plus roost fairly close: the chicks still travel very slowly.]

I observed Eric Plus for a while yesterday; and here are my thoughts:

Eric is a seasoned and competent parent. Look at his timing in respect of the earliest fruit. These plums are small and hard and bitter, but they represent the jump from Time of Little Yellow Flowers to that time of year when the birds pack it on for winter, and he got the first of them. I surmise that he has ‘held’ this clearing for (most of) six years or more. That’s an enormous evolutionary boon for his offspring.

He’s highly vigilant. The emus I observe usually lift their heads to check for danger about once every seven seconds. With Eric at present, it’s about every four. He seems curiously inattentive to the chicks; but that makes sense: the chicks are always and everywhere quite safe on ‘auto pilot’ if there are no predators in the vicinity. Eric is not ‘watching the chicks.’ He’s watching for predators. (The chicks, like any children, have their own life project going on meanwhile. They run here and there; stop to eat a little wheat; move to graze on wild stuff; get under dad’s feet.)

I was wrong about the distance of the chicks’ ‘orbit.’ They seem quite happy to be as much as sixty or eighty feet -- or more -- from dad, though adult and chick start talking to each other much more as the chicks get further away.

The chicks’ diet is remarkably good. Because they are so small, they are sort of in monster food world. A flower that is a mere morsel for an adult bird is a mouthful for the chick. They do graze at ground level; but it’s remarkable how much they take from eye level, a steady stream of nutritious grass seeds and flowers. They don't think much of the wheat. It's surely too big and hard.


Okay, no other emus have turned up. I am following Felicity’s behaviour with interest.



S.E.

 

[kbgh]

Great pic Mark.

Kerry

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Eric Plus have been here four mornings in a row, so it looks like these chicks will eventually be citizens here. (Anyone who wants to is free to come and argue with Eric about this. Wa ha ha)

I can’t get out of my head this ‘I once saw 64 birds here in a single afternoon.’ I did, but perhaps it was a fluke. I suspect my guesses at demo-emu-graphics are wrong by hundreds of percent. Gonna try to nail that one.

We have standing permission from the owner to poke quietly around the swamp paddock and the vicinity of the Top Corner, and I am off there this morning to look for roosts.

S.E.

 

[kbgh]

Are the chicks with Eric getting the wheat?

Good to hear you got the open standing to explore and observe the swamp paddock and Top Corner.

Keep up the reports.

kerry

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Hi, Kerry!

Well, yes: the chicks are getting their share of wheat; but they seem just as comfortable grazing on wild stuff near dad. It's Eric who really likes the wheat.

I hope everyone doesn't find it boring to wander about peering at blessings. Every bit of data is connected to every other bit. So, where birds graze, and what they graze on, and where they roost, and how far they travel in a day, and their positions in the pecking-order are all related questions.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

We spent an hour watching five birds on the swamp paddock. (‘Emus are a solitary creature.’) [Some thoughts on runts later.] We hoped to see where the birds that graze on that pasture go when they withdraw.

Bingo! The appearance of a farm vehicle disturbed the birds, and they crossed the fence back into my place. I did my Where Do Emus Roost? calculation, and . . . two roosts in ten minutes!

It was a pleasant hour. (Gotta get a softer rock to lean on . . . ) The birds were perfectly at ease, grazing in sunshine, sometimes on their knees; but a gateway has been closed since I last observed there, and the birds were definitely (later) trying to figure out What It All Meant.

I now have photos of seven roosts.

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Excursion to The Farthest Corner of Planet Rothschildi

​

Readers, it just doesn’t get any better than Sunday-afternoon walks after spring rain, and we’re off to learn a little more about the original swamp by exploring the far corner of The 500 – which, in five years here, I had yet to visit – and to stickybeak into the nature reserve across the road, where the western end of the original swamp was (I think).
And just to get you on the hook, here below is a photo that is a first. Look carefully . . . see it? You’re looking at the imprint of the scaly skin of a wild bird’s lower legs as it kneels to drink at a dam deep in The 500. There were several tracks at this dam. I tasted the water. It was okay.



Firstly, we stumbled upon an ‘open air’ roost, that is, the first roost we’ve found that is not in a clump of trees. This one is in an aisle of gums. No, I don’t understand; but it’s definitely a roost. All data is good data.




At that point, we were just headed off into the ‘far corner’ of The 500. There is fabulous timber of every sort in here (except for the boringboring blue gums): huge torn old redgums, paperbarks, massive trunks rotting in situ, and strange Harry Potter fellows like these. (E.H., I tried to get you a photo like this by 3:30 a.m. moonlight; but my mobile-phone camera wasn’t up to it.)



Our main mission today was to extend our map of the Original Swamp. Here below is a bad photo – my mobile-phone camera is losing its mind. The photo is of a long strip of swamp lying between two other parts of the Original Swamp that I already knew of.


The photo below here is of a paperbark – a swamp tree. It was beside the patch of swamp in the photo above. It was fifty paces between me and the tree – I measured it – and two kangaroos came barrelling through between me and the tree as I was lining it up. (If you are a truly astute observer, you’ll see the tragedy going on under the paperbark: those light green plants are scotch thistle, and – since the farmers left the land a decade ago – have begun to proliferate.)



At that point, readers, we reached the far side of The 500, and crossed a dirt road into Cobertup Nature Reserve. I knew there was a patch of swamp there – there are boronias, which are apparently rare and beautiful – but I had never poked my beak in further. What I found is awesome:



Supreme Emu wasn’t feeling too supreme by this time. The light on his battery meter was flashing red, so he turned for home. We’ll return to this spot.
We’ll have to think about what the pasture by this wetland system was like Originally; but what you can see in the picture is a solid six feet deep, and the tips of the reeds are over seven. (Supreme Emu went, ‘Yeh, okay! I’ll just wade right on in there – whoa!! No, I won’t!!)
Practice ‘re-configuring’ in your heads, aficionados: try to conceive the original environment of this species. Subtract the fences* and pastures; reduce the numbers of birds; but see them brutally forced onto rapidly diminishing summer-and-autumn pastures. For example, there are eight dams on my place and as many on The 500. There’s a similar density on other plantations. Think of the first roost we examined, over at the back of Oudman’s. That roost is one hundred yards from a dam, but if the dam wasn’t there, that roost wouldn’t be there because it’s a mile through bush down to the Frankland River. Pre-historically, the Frankland River and the long lush Original Swamp were – gee, I think – the only permanent water on Planet Rothschildi.
The burnt-out tree in the photo below is something I just like. I don’t know why. There are a few scattered about.




Then off home. Eric Plus was grazing quietly in the clearing – and so was another pair of birds that ran off when I turned up. I still suspect it’s Speckles plus shy bird. Gotta get a good look.
Supreme Emu

*Found an emu corpse just by the fence of the swamp paddock today. What’s the bet it injured itself crossing the fence, and was pulled down by foxes. It’s only the second one I’ve yet seen though.