Pyxis' Emu Chat Thread

[WVduckchick]

mouse -mice
goose -geese
deer- deer
emu- emoozes

it's aboriginal plural, or you can use the King James version "yea emus "

hope you know i'm just goofin with you. can't help it not a serious person. maternal was fine and we all knew what you meant.

Emoozes.

 

[MagpieDucks]

Names?

 

[Pyxis]

Names?

Working on it I had joked that I'd name B Mercury if he was a boy, so I'm thinking about actually doing it, lol.

 

[matt swenson]

congratulations, sweet you got a pair. I assume you wanted a pair so 2+ years and a few thousand in feed later, you'd have blond breeders?? Are they biological siblings? is inbreeding a problem or all blonds from the same bloodline. when i got my emu chicks, i got them from two different bloodlines. reason i'm asking, if and it's a big IF any of my eggs hatch i thinking i would need to find mates from other bloodlines. Been reading and i haven't found any concrete opinions on this. never really considered it before but i have had plenty of chickens who were bred by their own "father" or "brother" and had all healthy chicks. (now i'm wishing i hadn't thought about it). i'm also betting there is a large percent of this in the wild turkeys around my area. so i guess what i wondering, how much inbreeding , in birds, can occur without there being genetic problems?

 

[Pyxis]

congratulations, sweet you got a pair. I assume you wanted a pair so 2+ years and a few thousand in feed later, you'd have blond breeders?? Are they biological siblings? is inbreeding a problem or all blonds from the same bloodline. when i got my emu chicks, i got them from two different bloodlines. reason i'm asking, if and it's a big IF any of my eggs hatch i thinking i would need to find mates from other bloodlines. Been reading and i haven't found any concrete opinions on this. never really considered it before but i have had plenty of chickens who were bred by their own "father" or "brother" and had all healthy chicks. (now i'm wishing i hadn't thought about it). i'm also betting there is a large percent of this in the wild turkeys around my area. so i guess what i wondering, how much inbreeding , in birds, can occur without there being genetic problems?

Yep, I wanted a pair for a good gender ratio and also because I will breed them. I don't know if they're related. @Kalifornsky had a couple emus laying when I bought the eggs and has multiple blondes (and I think even whites) so who really knows? If you don't have your pairs separated, the females are probably 'cheating' on their main mate, also, according to that study that was posted, so even if you know the female for sure, you don't know the father for sure if they weren't separated.

Even if they are related, I'm not too worried about it. Breeding related birds together is a pretty common practice, especially in chickens. Line breeding, spiral breeding, breeding fathers to daughters and sons to mothers, etc etc, is very common.

Plus, I'll probably breed B to Ciara as well, who is totally unrelated, and I could get a blonde from them to keep to breed with C down the line, if I wanted to. He'd still possibly be related to her, of course, but less related.

All blondes and whites probably did at some point originate with one single bird that first showed the mutation. Look at welsh harlequin ducks; the entire breed is derived from two individuals that popped up in a flock of khaki campbells. It's probably the same for blonde and white emus. A bird with the mutation hatched, and was bred a lot to perpetuate it.

 

[Pyxis]

I may name the babies after constellations - that's where my username here and farm name come from, after all. If I do that, I think I like Draco for B. Maybe Leo or Orion, but I don't know if I like those as much, and I already had a rooster named Leo. Or Rigel, which is the name of a star.

For C, I was thinking maybe Lyra, Carina, or Vela. Andromeda too, but if I did that people would think I was doing a Harry Potter theme if I named B Draco, lol. There's also Cassiopeia, but I'm not as much a fan of that one. Or I could name her Dove, after Columba, but technically that's not really a constellation name, and I had a duck named Dove.

There's also Phoenix, which is pretty unisex and could work for either.

 

[matt swenson]

it could have been a truck driving by, or an earthquake, or my heavy breathing ....i think a saw one of my eggs wiggle. I'm at 42 days, so there should be something, right??? it was during my lunch egg turn. going take them out this evening when things are still and check again.

 

[SilksterTN]

it could have been a truck driving by, or an earthquake, or my heavy breathing ....i think a saw one of my eggs wiggle. I'm at 42 days, so there should be something, right??? it was during my lunch egg turn. going take them out this evening when things are still and check again.

I'm sure you gotta hold your tongue juuuuuust right too

 

[Kalifornsky]

I love the idea of naming them after constellations or stars! You're right that I thought of Harry Potter the second you said Draco: it's not a bad name, but the name is Slytherin-in-nature for a lot of people, lol. Good luck with naming, I like the potentials!

The chicks are likely to be siblings, and it'll be hard to keep our birds from inbreeding with limited fencing options. Right now the mom emu fancies her son while the dad emu is sitting on eggs, so I guess if it keeps her happy, let her stick around. She gets stressed out if I try to separate them, and since she's not laying anymore it's not that big a deal.

I have a cautionary tale when we first got our blonde/white birds. One of them, as he was growing up, had a kind of spine deformity that was either extreme wry neck or hereditary. The breeder said he must've gotten it from injury, or perhaps it really was wry neck and we didn't know enough then to give him supplements. But his spine ended up curving so much that he passed away after about a year. He was still extremely affectionate and lovable, just his poor spine wasn't in order.

 

[Pyxis]

it could have been a truck driving by, or an earthquake, or my heavy breathing ....i think a saw one of my eggs wiggle. I'm at 42 days, so there should be something, right??? it was during my lunch egg turn. going take them out this evening when things are still and check again.

Make sure you whistle to them They often respond to whistling by wiggling.