Planet Rothschildi

[dak]

Oh look! A wild emu chick coming past my lounge room door! Eat your heats out.

S.E.

Gnarly!

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Today’s roll was Eric Plus – almost all day – and Speckles and Sarah, and I’m sure I saw Felicity in the company of a bird or two; but she didn’t get a feed, which is a real disappointment.

It seems that the chicks are ‘imprinting’ on the house-clearing, and I’m not sure that that’s good – but are my birds pets? or tame? under observation? My concern is that Felicity will lose her place here. She wouldn’t be able to hold her own against Greedy plus consort, and Eric plus consort, and adult Alpha and Omega (the chicks).
One blessing shows that the bird in question is really hooking into the ripening grass seeds.

Supreme Emu will be off the air for a few days, and then perhaps a guest blogger in the form of five-year-old Jack.

S.E.

 

[kbgh]

Great pic of the chick S.E. Makes me want a couple more than ever.

The chicks definitely will "imprint" on the house clearing. Afterall dad aka Eric is definitely "imprinted" there and since he is constantly bringing the chicks around, so logic says they will "imprint" and feel it is a safe haven if not "home". Nothing wrong with that.

Are your birds pets, I think not, they just like you, maybe you are their pet

Remember my dfinition from an earlier post
Quote: So are Eric, Greedy, Felicity, Speclkes and the chicks tame? By definition YES.

Are they PETS - NO.

By definition

Quote:

Noun:

1. A domestic or tamed animal or bird kept for companionship or pleasure and treated with care and affection.

The key here is "kept for companionship or pleasure" Your whole crew belies this for they are not "kept" emu and they are free to roam and come and go as they please.

Under observation, not the EMU but it is you who is under observation. They watch, they want , when is our human going to put out the wheat? Does he have a pocket full of sultanas?

See ya in a coupla days.

Kerry

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Yes, K.B., overall, enthusiastic and correct and helpful; but there is a distinction worth mentioning (though I don’t yet fully comprehend it):

The chicks I tamed are imprinted on the house-clearing, and I was central to that; but they didn’t turn up ‘til they were about six months old.

Eric isn’t imprinted here. Indeed, the house-clearing is within his territory; but he’s not emotionally attached to it, so to speak. Rather, he’s an ‘alpha opportunist,’ which is why he comes and stakes out his claim principally during the fruit season. We note that he doesn’t breed here, whereas Greedy and consort bred did.

This makes Boy Emu an experiment: he followed his consort, incubated on her turf, and, as long-term readers recall, left with the clutch the hour the last one hatched . . . and hasn’t been seen since. It may be that the house-clearing is, yes, okay, known territory to B.E., but not at all a part of his turf. B.E. may never clap eyes on Greedy again.

[The GPS Thing! The GPS Thing! Oh! to know (a) how far Greedy and Felicity range, (b) where G. and B.E. met, and (c) whether B.E. is now raising the chicks where he imprinted!!]

Finally, the ‘new chicks’ are yet another case. They were brought here considerably earlier. So, they are ‘imprinting deeper,’ so to speak. It is this ‘depth’ that ultimately concerns me. Suppose these new chicks simply spend more time based here. Suppose that one day, when they are, say, four, it transpires that Greedy and consort, and Felicity (and consort?) and Eric (and Mrs. Eric?) and Alpha and Omega (and their consorts?) all turn up at the same time! The house-clearing would be ‘running too hot.’

Supreme Emu

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Every so often, things go right. An old mate of mine brought me back from the big smoke, and camped, with her four-year-old and five-year-old, in the farmhouse. Eric Plus turned up as though on schedule. The five-year-old was entranced, but the four-year-old backed spontaneously away from the chicks -- ??

Next morning, we all went observing, in slow motion, rather noisily, with purple and pink sun hats on. Amazingly, we sighted a male with two chicks right out in the open down at the corridor – the first chicks, except Eric’s or at the nursery, that we have observed this season. Clearly the male feels that they are fleet enough, though Mother Nature is certainly on their heels.

The five-year-old and I found an adult emu’s track in the mud at the edge of a dam, and it was he who noted that the imprint of the scale on the foot was visible – but it got better: we found a number of chicks’ tracks, including the mark where one had kneeled to drink (and the rest of nature obliged us, readers: wedge-tailed eagles feeding by the road . . .


big wedgies feeding by the road . . .


They are massive in the air, and surprisingly tall while standing.
And rosellas, corellas, kookaburras -- the whole cast).

Supreme Emu

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

I am in error. I think I saw Eric’s parenting skills in a sort of ‘romantised’ way. In the last two or three weeks, the fences around my yard have made for a sort of experiment, readers.

You recall that The Bad People in The Night chopped a big chunk out of the back-yard fence. Thus the chicks can get out. What I’ve noticed, though, is that on several occasions, Eric has left the chicks stranded in the yard:
a fence prevents the chicks from moving ‘line-of-sight’ back to Eric. They start cheeping piteously. Eric grunts . . . but basically ignores them at length.

Just this afternoon, I saw Eric in the yard, with the chicks, taxing the early plums. He then stepped out over a low point in the fence, and moseyed off. The chicks couldn’t follow, and were in a low-level flap. Eric did eventually come back into the yard through the side gate, which allowed the chicks to fall back into formation.

So, yes, he cares; but I still have a lot to learn about how he parents.

S.E.

 

[kbgh]

Maybe he using th and he needs a lil down time for himself. He uses the fenced area as a baby sitter so he can have a lil time to himself. After being both mom and dad to his chicks has to be tiring

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Yes, I can giggle at the notion of downtime. I sure have thought about how hard the male’s lot is. (Gee!! Almost as hard as the lot of the female in most species, including ours . . . )

You gain an insight into, K.B., when you see them on their knees, in the middle of winter, in howling wind and pouring rain, cramming themselves with grass that just must not quite be filling their bellies – but the nesting birds don’t even get that. That’s what makes the Little Yellow Flowers Thing in spring so interesting: if we BYC-ers were stuck on a desert island for six months, with nothing but fruit to eat, imagine how we would tuck into a cheese-and-tomato sandwich when we got one!! Even perhaps six or eight weeks after the hatch, the male must be working hard to stuff himself, to catch up on what he lost during winter.
So, Eric: I begin to think thus: it’s a proximity thing: his vigilance provides a sort of ‘zone’ of (relative) safety. Within the zone, perhaps the chicks just sorta wander around.

A snippet of this was perhaps evident yesterday. The male that we spotted didn’t lead the chicks as they all bolted. Yet again, a sort of ‘shepherding’ function was evident (and how on earth does dad communicate this?). At first, the three stood their ground. Then the chicks bolted. (Wa ha ha – like low-flying rockets. A respectable turn of speed. Headed for the scrub.) Then dad followed.
I have a small but growing set of observations of this type. The first time I ever saw it I was fascinated. A visitor to the farmhouse had gone quietly walking. Just before she returned, a wild male [‘tame(0)’] came out of the gums with a single tiny chick, newly hatched. Then the human hove quietly into sight. What followed was a ballet of a pattern that I now recognise: the male just can’t bolt – the chick is too slow. The male doesn’t attack. What happens is that the male moves between the threat and the chick(s). The chick(s) heads off in the opposite direction. The male follows, then moves into the lead. It’s just a wonderful thing to watch.

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Supreme Emu Migrates

Supreme Emu had to hitch to The Big Smoke, about three-hundred miles. Flock of One on the move. Here below is sunrise over the National Park, just down the road from my front gate. (We have audited down here.):



I chose a different route, off the beaten track, and found myself thinking like an emu:

it goes like this, beloved readers: Planet Rothschildi, the bottom-left corner of Oz, gets its weather from the south west. The very first storm I saw after I moved into the farmhouse, witnessed from a camp chair under a plastic poncho in the middle of the house-clearing (with just a single glass of red wine), was a copper-coloured bulldozer-blade a million miles wide. It sounded, coming in across the gums, like the Locomotive of the Gods.

On the coast, you get ‘X’ inches of rain per year. Here, thirty or forty miles inland, you get 50% of ‘X.’ By the time you get to Cranbrook, about eighty miles from the coast, you’re down to 25% of X. Beyond that, you are moving into ‘Big Wheat Country’: flat, featureless, dusty, marginal – almost what Steinbeck called ‘dustbowl.’

Yet again, in the country through which I hitched, it’s all about humans: fences and dams. But the quality of the feed is noteworthy. Have a look:




Two things came to mind. The first concerns how much an emu drinks. Perhaps in winter, while eating rain-saturated grass that has good water content to boot, an emu needs to drink relatively little water. The second is the opposite: check the foregrounds of the photos.

[There’s a lone wild bird doing a long slow silent reconnaissance of the clearing from the edge of the gums.]

I think that the grass seeds on that grass are very good tucker, but perhaps wild birds would need to be drinking a lot of water to go with it.

(Test Your Emu-Ness: did you graze on the tiny patch of green in the foreground of the top photo? No? Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. Do not live' til winter!)

[If you ever find yourself in an aisle seat on a Jakarta-Sydney flight, take in your hand every banknote you possess, and start bribing your way to a window seat. The plane crosses the coast at dawn over Derby (Check a map). There’s a strip of green about as wide as your backyard. For the following five hours, ruler-straight across the continent, it’s desert, blending to light green then green as you cross western New South Wales. As you circle down towards Sydney, you see the massive granite cliffs of the Blue Mountains. Picasso and Monet and da Vinci would concede defeat.]

So, the novaehollandiae have, I think, a generally fair territory. The rothschildi in my backyard – bottom left – are a bit spoiled. I’ll take a wild guess that – pre-historically -- they covered a fifth as many miles in their lifetimes as did the rothschildis four or five hundred miles north east of here.

The woodwardi must generally be/have been the hardiest and the most mobile.

I think we will eventually be able to punch a big hole in the ‘emu migration theory.’ I betcha it would transpire that some pockets of birds, those in truly fortunate circumstances – a sort of bigger version of the alpha community centred on the clearing here – lived in a fairly small area, and only had to hit the trail once or twice in a lifetime.

Conversely, it may have been that the birds in the Tanami Desert, the area covered in Hillards’ The People in Between lived oppositely: nine out of ten seasons were spent on the track, in a constantly semi-desperate situation. One anecdote in Hillard relates how some aboriginal hunters spent two days waiting to get some emus that spent two days waiting to drink at the waterhole where the aboriginals were waiting for them – two days!!

S.E.

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Now, S.E. cannot personally testify as to the Yumminess of any of the plants in the photo below. He himself is more an Indonesian-yellow-curry-chicken-and-okra sort of emu. However, while sitting in the garden last evening, it occurred to me to that there was a nice array of seeds growing around me – am I on the right track here, guys? Seeds are the really nutritious elements of a bird’s diet?






Here are The Notes:

One: these are from the house-clearing. This is alpha community food.

Two: this collection was the work of mere moments. There are certainly more species both in the clearing and further afield.

Three: note how many of the species are introduced! There are five fruits in the bottom left hand corner. (The figs aren’t ripe enough be on the menu yet. The pears won’t be targeted for a while yet.) We see clover (above the fruit, yellowing. It’s season is near finished, but it’s a favourite.). We see scotch thistle (Again, season nearly finished. The ‘juicier’ young ‘heads’ are almost done – but the young plants around the clearing have all been decapitated, so the birds are definitely eating them.). We see kikuyu – any more non-natives visible to you?

Four: there is the simple fact that it is an array: the chicks don’t get the grapes: they are high, and don’t fall naturally. There are flowers. There are grasses. There are seeds.

Five: wouldn’t it be interesting to hire an artificial stomach – don’t laugh, there’s one in the U.K., used for paleoanthropological research – and try to find out how many zillionty pounds of food like this gets you one pound of emu fat?

Supreme Emu