The life of Daryl the emu

[mich9510]

Hi everyone! I've decided to chronicle the life and times of my emu Daryl. My hope is that I can connect with other emu and ratite enthusiasts. I would also like to share my experience hatching and raising Daryl in the hopes that it will educate others. Tomorrow I will be posting a chronicle of the incubation experience. Stay tuned!

 

[mich9510]

One more picture. It was just too cute not to post.

 

[briefvisit]

Morning, N F C.

Emooooz have two postures. Here is one, 'normal horizontal' (The bird is Felicity. If you google just 'Felicity Emu,' half of the photos that come up are my place: she is famous):



Here is the other, 'upright' (This is Felicity's famous sister, 'Greedy,' now feared dead.):


In the upright mode, an adult is almost six feet tall.

But they can jump much higher than captive-bird owners would probably guess. I saw Greedy, a 'double-alpha' bird, with the top of her head certainly nine feet off the ground as she landed the two-footed kick to her dad's chest that brought her her dad's crown, control of the house-clearing pasture.

Adult birds -- for example, during the fig season here -- can often be seen stretching up/jumping up to score juicy figs and other tit bits. On tippy toes, about six feet six.

 

[mich9510]

Weeeellll...its a girl!
Daryl is a Darla! Just got the DNA results this afternoon. So excited!

 

[mich9510]

I though I'd better post an update on Daryl. Its been a few days.
Daryl will be 4 months old on April 25th. She is becoming so much more independent. She's still sleeping in the chicken coop but during the day she spends most of her time by herself. Im surprised she's still sleeping in the coop, when it gets dark she just walks right in and lays down.
I haven't heard her distress call in about a week. When we heard her before we would say "daryl's lost" and have to find her chicken friends for her. (Recall i had to buy Daryl some isa brown chicks from rural king because she was lonely). If she sees her chickens she walks over to say hi but it turns out these Isa Browns have the activity level of a cornish cross which simply wont do for Daryl.
I know this is probably abnormal but we actually feed daryl in the house in the entry way. All the chickens and ducks love the fresh greens, fruit, nuts, and insects we give Daryl, in addition to her pellets we supplement with. They all get their own treats and emu pellets arent cheap. So when daryl gets hungry she simply comes to the door and whistles at us. We let her in, she eats her fill, and then goes back outside. Sometimes she snacks on the chickens feed but most of her food is specially made for her by her humans. I will type some more regarding her relationships with the other animals and her humans later but i have to get ready for work.

 

[mich9510]

Daryl today.

 

[mich9510]

The incubation temperature for emus is between 95 and 97.5 degrees F. The lower the temperature, the longer the hatch date. if your average incubation temperature is 95 degrees, you can expect to be incubating for 54-57 days. A higher average incubation temperature of 97.5 degrees will cut off a few days with the length being around 49-52 days . Yeah. And I thought ducks took forever to hatch.

I decided to play it safe right in the middle and went for a incubator temperature of between 96-97 degrees. I actually wanted a longer hatch time to give my guys extra time to grow and develop for stronger chicks. I don't have a fancy expensive incubator. I used my little giant still air with a fan in it to circulate the air. prior to setting my eggs, I weighed them, as I mentioned before. I also calibrated my thermometers ( I use kitchen meat thermometers) and hygrometers. I started with a dry incubator and adjusted my humidity based on weight.

Like chicken eggs you want your emu egg to lose about 15% of the total starting weight. Rick started out at 655g. 15% of that is 98.25g. Daryl weighed 716g so 15% of that is 107.4g. To further break that down, I wanted them to hatch at 54 days so Rick needed to lose 1.82g/day and Daryl needed to lose 1.99g/day. I weighed them twice a week and adjusted humidity based on how much they had lost.
Why is weight loss important? An egg shell is porous. Oxygen, carbon dioxide, and water are exchanged across the shell membranes. If a bird doesn't lose enough weight (weight = water) the air cell will not be large enough and he will drown/suffocate. If he loses too much weight, the membranes could become dry and the chick could become "shrink-wrapped" this can also result in chick death. As the developing embryo utilizes oxygen to metabolize the yolk lipids (fats) and the albumin proteins, carbon dioxide and water are produced. Egg weight is a way to monitor this process. This is why humidity plays as much of a role in embryonic development as temperature does. Incubating at a consistently too high humidity results in less embryonic respiration and a slower developing chick. For example, if either one of these eggs were incubated at 97 degrees for 54 days but the humidity was at 80% the whole time, they would not have been able to utilize all of the yolk and albumin which would have been replaced, in part, by the air cell. If they hatch at this point, there would still be too much yolk and albumin and they would drown, the air cell would be too small and they would suffocate, and they would not be developed enough. Clear as mud?




The following is a list of dates and weights for Rick and Daryl:
Rick:
starting weight 655g

Day of incubation Actual weight (g) Weight egg should be (g)
Day 4 646 648
Day 8 636 640
Day 11 634 635
Day 15 629 628
Day 19 625 620
Day 22 622 615
Day 26 617 608
Day 29 612 602
Day 33 606 595
Day 35 603 591
Day 37 598 588
Day 42 590 579
Day 45 586 573
Day 48 585 568
I did not weigh Rick after this because I was pretty sure he was a dud. I couldn't bring myself to take him out of the incubator yet though. He stayed in until Daryl hatched. The next day I cracked him open and this is what it looked like:





I actually didn't feel as bad as I would have if Rick had actually developed and died later. The egg didn't smell bad so I cooked it up and fed it to the chickens and ducks. They loved it! It turned out to be the size of about 10 chicken eggs. This is where I will stop referring to Rick. A few things to note: First, even though the embryo never started to develop, the egg still lost weight. I have seen where some people here think that just because an egg is losing weight, it has a live, developing embryo in it. I was one of those people until a kind soul explained it to me. We all have to learn somewhere and from someone, I'm just giving a real world example to help educate. The second point I'd like to note is that Rick's weight loss was very different from Daryl's. This will be evident to the reader in my next post where I share Daryl's weights through the incubation. The weights being so far different led me to believe that one of the eggs was probably not viable but until day 42, I didn't know which one (Daryl had a positive wiggle test).

In my next post, I will be discussing How to tell if there is a developing embryo in an emu egg. Here's a hint: it's not by candling them.

Thanks for reading!

 

[mich9510]

Sorry about the wait on an update....
Daryl is still doing really well



I'm exhausted after a very busy weekend so I'm going to take a nap and post Daryl's incubation stats when I wake up.

 

[mich9510]

Yes. Daryl is my only one. I had two eggs but only one developed. He was very lonely so I went to rural king and bought him some friends.

 

[briefvisit]

I'm the one (my original username here is 'Supreme Emu') responsible for coining the term 'spazzy dance.' So . . . google 'emu spazzy dance.'

If you let Daryl outside at first-bird-call of dawn, for a few days in a row, you will see that running around is not from fright, but from pure delight in being a high-speed dinosaur. The motions of spazzy dances are mixed with completely crazy spurts of highest-speed runs; and I've been lucky enough to see even better spazzies than this:

If you watch a range of spazzy vids, you'll see clearly what I was saying about space: the chicks and adults charge to and fro along fences, clearly looking to run harder and faster. In the house-clearing here, they may cover 6-800 yards, in bursts of 200 at a time, in hardly a minute.