& then there was one

Yesterday a tree trimming & removal crew (that we have used before; they are great) was here, doing what they do.  We had the emus (& the other animals) contained but then Antonelle, the female emu did something we never expected.  She became so panicked while branches were being removed by Bobcat she pushed so hard she knocked the center board out of a three boards fence & ran out into the street.  One+ hour for me & two of the tree guys to get her contained, another hour for A & the same two guys to get her back in her yard.  She never recovered from the shock & died around 9:30 last night.

Yes, I am sorry.  I already miss her voice (she made a noise that sounds like the opening chords of These Boots Were Made For Walking...no, really.  The thrum-thrum-thrumming, not the tambourine.  CleoPatton, her mate is calm-ish as I type this.  The tree guys are back today & making as much noise as ever, but he never was as high strung as she was.  He is pacing, but showing no sign of doing himself equal damage.  What happens next is anyone's guess.  Emus are not wired for solitary living, but we really don't want another one. 

Poor Antonelle.  Up until 5:09 yesterday she had a very nice emu life & was happy & well cared for.  In the end, though, there was no reasoning with an 80lb animal with a brain the size of a chihuahua's.

& so he/she sits

The big birds had a clutch of eggs & CleoPatton started sitting on them two-three days before we left last December.  Because V** needed to get thru there every day & because Antonelle's hormones amp her up when he goes into his brooding coma, we took the eggs away.  We knew they were not viable; they were left exposed overnight during several freezes & no matter how diligent the birds: these eggs were never going to hatch.

Then we left, had a happy vacation (pictures to appear here ...whenever I get around to it).  We got back to snow on Christmas Day.  Okay, flurries but still Snow?  in Fladidah?  The birds seemed kind of sluggish, but in that cold we weren't all that surprised.  I started  leaving extra apples for them (they are stoopid-crazy for apples, if you ever need to lead an emu, I recommend a feed scoop full of cut apples), checked them where they chose to hunker down (I assumed they were conserving heat) & did not think much about it.  Until I realized they seemed to stay hunkered in the same general area.

It took a while, but I finally clued in that SHE was sitting on a new, smaller clutch of eggs.  & he was sitting nearby, what we call nest-adjacent. & this has been how it has been.  We thought at first maybe he had moved the eggs & sat on them, or maybe had split away some of them but no...she is definitely sitting on all of the eggs & he is sitting with her.  Sometimes they switch, but most of the time when she gets up, he gets up & follows her where ever she goes.  Yes, he's a dead-beat dad but he is devoted to her.

We decided against removing the eggs this time.  I worry about her going thru the whole lay eggs/lose weight thing for a third time in one season.  & so she sits.  & he sits with her.  & so we wait...until they just don't sit anymore.

Riled raptors react rapidly

The emus have had it.  Long, cold wintery days (this is Fladidah, damn it), dog attacks & today was the last straw.  The contractor hired by the power line people to trim branches arrived bright & early with no notice whatsoever & needed access to the back pasture.  In the past they have gone down the neighbors driveway, as the power line actually runs along this fence line.  On our side, there are intersecting fences making the whole process much more of an ordeal. 

This morning, though, there were a number of reasons they had to cut limbs from our side & unfortunately the back gate was too narrow.  So for several hours today Antonelle ran herself ragged trying to get away from the loud grinding noises of tree limbs being cut & falling & chipped.  She scraped her neck sticking her head through the rails of the fence & pacing, pacing, pacing.  By noon, I was exhausted just watching her.

My problem right this minute is I cannot tell if I am aggravated because of all the other aggravating stuff that has happened this month or am I aggravated because they could not pick up the phone last Friday, last night & let us know they would be here & we could have dealt with the 'big chickens' (their words) before they got here.  I suspect it is a combination of both, although I have noticed a strangely cavalier attitude towards schedules south of the Mason Dixon that would get a person laughed out of business just north of it.  So maybe on top of everything else, this is just another outlander problem.

Dogs will be dogs; owners will be shot

We thought we knew whose dog did this (the avian vet confirmed it was certainly an animal, & unless opossum or raccoons have started walking on their tiptoes (what would be required to deliver this strike), we are pretty sure it was a dog.  We even thought we had a good idea whose dogs, but yet another has been sited (& pelleted) while chasing a neighbors cats.  We are waiting for the owner to biotch about the pellet wounds so we can give them this vet bill....

Anyway, the picture below is bloody, but if you eat steak you should be able to handle it.  This happened Friday morning after we had unloaded a hay roll etc. (say by 9/9:15) & before I went out to check on the chickens (10/10:30).  We kept her stalled until Monday 4:30 when her mate broke her out.  He has been taking care of her ever since, which is mostly a good thing it just makes it hard to be sure she gets the anti-biotic laden fruit.

Flight of the bumble bee

We have a little dog & we call her breed Schnitzel de Hua Hua & we call her Janiac (rhymes with maniac).  The thinking is she is some mix of dachshund & chihuahua, but we are not quite sure what mix.  Or why.  She has teeny-tiny feet at the end of short narrow stalks & a sturdy, powerful body behind a pin-head.  My dog is a pin-head.

Weighing in around 12-14 pounds, we estimate she has a brain roughly the size of a walnut & we do not mean a particularly large walnut.  It can pump the heart, inflate the lungs & anything else is maybe a bridge too far.

She has A LOT of energy & a surprising amount of lift.  She jumps easily from the floor to a bench  from the bench to a the examining table in the vets office.  No running, no pulling just two straight vertical leaps.  The tech watching her laughed & said it was like the bumblebee; no reason she should get off the ground but she does, every time, with ease.

She does not have a lot of brains.  I do not just mean a lack of the concept Sit Stay, I mean a complete refusal to understand that the horses running around are not playing with her, they are not afraid of her, they are not even aware of her.  & they will not be aware when they squash her like a pancake (I spend too much time unsuccessfully trying to making sure she does not go out there).  She was once sprayed by a skunk, full in the face, with all that entails (burning eyes followed by multiple cold chemical baths) & went right back at that skunk the next morning.  Heart of a lion, brain of a roll of paper towels.

On Tuesday I heard a strained barking from the side yard (where the emus live) & went out to find this:

 

I called & called & could not get her to jump down & run to me (this picture was taken from the other side of the fence; the distance is maybe 6 feet & she could clear three of it with the jump itself).  The reason she would not jump?  This:

In the end, I went in & lifted her down, over the fence.  She ran right back under the gate & tried crawl up my body while Antonelle slowly advanced.  The good news is Janiac has been much better about staying in the yard.  & it only took six years.  & a near death experience.

//for your troubles I give you the flight of the bumble bee & the flight of the bumble bee

Wrong time

As per usual, the big birds started breeding as autumn came to an end, started laying when the weather turned chilly & last night being the first freeze of our winter, sat egg-adjacent all night thereby guaranteeing there will be no emu babies again this year. This is perfectly fine in the grand scheme of things (& if I were all fired up for emu babies I would bring them to an incubator) but it does make me think on two lines:

1. why the hell can they not get their calendar right?  I mean, giant prehistoric birds are not using paper to tell them it is breeding season, they must be using some weather-clue?  How then did they get it almost exactly wrong?

2.  maybe it is the time of year but I am thinking of entirely different lives I would have lived if I had returned that phone call, not quit that job, quit that one sooner, left well enough alone.  I can honestly identify two other, different ways my life certainly would have gone.  I do not think I am special in this, I think everyone can reflect on their lives & find at least one instance of right-place-right-time/wrong-place-wrong-time that made a difference that would not have been made a step or two earlier, later or at an entirely different juncture.

I am not complaining; I like my life.  I just realize it would not have taken much at particular points for it to be a very different life.  & I probably would have liked that one too. I am just wired that way.

In which I use a large flightless bird to predict an obvious outcome to a well documented weather pattern

Antonelle & CleoPatton cannot seem to get enough to drink. Last year (& the previous year), one maybe two full buckets of water a day was typical. Actually, it was not because I would tip their buckets out twice a day & there was always water to tip. Now 3-4-5 refills are not unusual.

A has done quite a bit of research on emus (he used to worry about them being to cold or too hot & then he just got interested). I have done rather less.

When the birds arrived they were under fed (they are still small for emus & probably always will be; M****** says they are only frightening as opposed to truly terrifying), so my job was to "put some groceries on them" as horsey-folk might say. & so I started making my own mix of poultry feed, oyster shell & a few varieties of bulk calories. They took to it right away.

I also read the chapter on flightless birds in Charles Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle. It was helpful, arguably because it was free of any agenda or prejudice, at least as far as large flightless birds go. Also, Darwin obviously spent a lot of time researching other, similar birds trying to understand what he saw & that research helped me, too.

In his reading, A learned that emus conserve water efficiently & uniquely (among ratites only rheas seem to handle things the same way). The short version is they are able to pull moisture from the air around them to a significant degree (we mostly have to actually drink it). They can then use the moisture to regulate their own hydration & colling (& heating, which is actually the more remarkable bit).

My hocus-pocus contribution is: if the emus are that thirsty, there most be something drier than ever before hanging about them (I like to mix theories together, here I have combined a complete lack of understanding of energy conservation in flightless birds with a Victorian theory of miasma vapors. John Snow is probably spinning in his crypt).

& so I am predicting a worse-than-previous-years fire season here in Florida. & so is everyone else. But I did it differently.

Losing things

At the beginning of this week I lost my keys. This is especially impressive as I have almost as many key-chain do-dads as I have keys. I say almost because I removed the little monkey that could be considered a stuffed animal when I realized it was tempting the dogs to bury the keys in their bed, their toy basket or (most problematic) the yard.

I looked everywhere, starting with the obvious & ending with sifting through the garbage, walking the yard with a flashlight & calling A at work (twice) just in case he picked them up by accident. In the end, I found them a day+ later in one of the first places I looked. Lame, I know.

But then I scaled up. On Wednesday I closed the gate at the top of the driveway, opened the emu yard & did a few chores. Two hours later, there was no sign of Cleo. That's right, I lost a giant pre-historic bird. That cannot fly. Or see very well.

Around dusk, I learned he was up at B***'s, scaring his dogs half-to-death. I learned this when a woman pulled into my driveway & told me my pet bird was up at her house: "the cracker house, up on the hill". This threw me until I remembered what passed for a hill in Florida versus Connecticut. She could have just as easily said "the house next to the blueberry field", "the second driveway on the left" or "B***'s house", but she did not. She seemed surprised that I knew B*** by name & still did not have the faintest idea who she was. I did not have the heart to tell her we have never bothered to learn the names of any of B***'s girlfriends (or wives for that matter).

Otherwise she could not have been nicer about it. Okay, she could have been nicer, she seemed a bit freaked (this was after I said she REALLY did not need to worry her dogs would hurt the bird; she needed to worry in the other directions), but in her shoes I would have been raining holy hell, so I think she was a brick. B***, as usual, was jovial-in-the-extreme. They had company for dinner & everyone seemed to enjoy the idea of me chasing this crazy bird around in the dark with a bucket of apples & a dieing flashlight. I have NO DOUBT all the crazy incomer stories were told & retold.

It was a long night & early this morning I walked back up there (he settled somewhere for the night & it is not possible to find an emu in tall grass if he does not stand up) & found him rummaging through the undergrowth, trying to avoid the sprinklers (did I mention Cleo was on the edge of a giant blueberry field? & that it was about 18F overnight, 22F when I left the house? Well he was & it was & it was) right away.

A & I both were wide awake well before dawn. I had not slept well worrying about my pet velociraptor & A got a phone call at 5:30 or so to go over some confusion in the 2009/2010 research budget. As soon as there was enough light for me to see (which is considerably less light than most need to see; yes, I am a creature of the dark), I took a bucket of feed & the rest of the chopped apples up the 'hill'. By the time A got there, I had Cleo eating from the bucket & had impressed the farm workers with my machismo, hand feeding the giant bird that had been hissing & kicking at their dogs (none of them were crazy enough to go near him themselves).

Cleo would have happily followed me (& the bucket of feed) home, but those same dogs objected to his passing them & in the end, A threw a blanket over him, lifted him into the bed of the pick-up & sat on him while I drove home. Once home, A lifted him out, took the blanket off & Cleo has been walking around his yard, his feathers ruffled (no, really) since then. As far as we can tell, Antonelle is not speaking to him. When he goes near her, she turns away. I leave you to imagine the dialogue between that unhappy couple.

Bad luck always comes in threes (or twelves or two hundred & forty sixes) so I am a bit worried about the next one, nine or two-hundred & forty four things I am going to lose.

Maybe baby not

Today is the 56th day CleoPatton has been sitting on those eggs. This morning I got a whiff of something 'not fresh' for the first time; last night there was no smell at all. We know he still had at least five intact eggs on Wednesday but have not been able to see anything since.

Unlike yesterday, today is warm (in the 70F range) & so he could get up for more than just a moment, but I admit that hanging out in W*****'s driveway (the only place with a clear view of the nest) for the day has limited appeal.

Still I think it is entirely possible there will be no babies at all. We hoped for, at most, a small percentage of hatchlings & I do not really mind none at all. Instead, we can have another easy season of hand-tamed prehistoric birds wandering the yard & not have to worry what happens if one of B***'s dogs, or worse one of our own, is mistaken for a baby-eater.

No news is good news & I am happy whichever way it goes. I think I should probably try to make this my whole approach to 2009.

Rip Van Emu

Yesterday was day 50 for the emu eggs (gestation is 48 - 52 OR 50 - 55 days, depending on which authority you go with). We are quite certain that at least one of the eggs he is sitting on has gone "bad", but the others are unknown. They are the Schrodinger's cats of emu eggs, if you will. Except that I am not planning on gassing them.

The day he sat on the eggs he stopped drinking. He ate pieces of apple for a day or two after that, but I can safely say he has had no water or food for 40+ days. We never see him stand, but he is often in a different position (facing a different direction) when we check on him.

We have also seen signs of scuffling around him, but we are fairly certain that is Antonelle patrolling & keeping him safe. Certainly, whenever we check on him, even if the emu yard gate is open (she loves to sit in the driveway & watch the road), she comes hurrying to check what is up. This is especially telling as we stopped giving him food the day after he started ignoring it so as not to attract any predators. She walks by a bin full of food to come watch us watch him.

Then today when we checked him around 11am he was alert. This is new. He ate every bit of apple put in front of him. He took several drinks of water & moved the grain around with his beak. Mother Nature is prepping him to wake up again. When the eggs hatch, if the eggs hatch, it will be him that keeps the babies safe & teaches them how to find food (in that little black tub right there).

Jurassic gigolo gets jiggy

If emus were into Barry White it would have been impossible to get any sleep around here. As it was, A had to proceed with caution whenever he moved in or around the emu yard because CleoPatton has been In The Mood. For reasons I would rather not consider, I am not his type.

It begins with the man-dance. Which is really more an exaggerated man-walk. He walks past you, looking at you, stops, turns & articulates each feather in a sweeping wave pattern & marches back. This goes one for several weeks. That's right, weeks.

If you let him, he will peck-bite your arms, your head & eventually the back of your neck. I am told it does not hurt. I would not know because I am not that kind of girl. No one will be surprised to learn that my husband is. A keeps trying to convince me it is amusing & I should just do it. I should be more worried that apparently he wants to swing with birds, but I just cannot seem to be bothered.

As things progress, CleoPatton will eventually get down on his haunches & start creeping up behind "the object of his desire" & mount it/her/you. I am happy to report that A does draw the line at this. Unfortunately, CleoPatton just stands & begins all over again. Once you have allowed him to bite the back of your neck, he will not take no for an answer. There is a lesson in there somewhere.

While CleoPatton goes through these motions, Antonelle, his patient partner, could not care less. At least I do not think she cares; facial expressions are a tough read on emus. She grooms her feathers & wanders off. She comes back later, sees he is all worked up & A just will not, well you know. So she gets down on the ground & he moves in on her, no preliminaries, done in 30 seconds. This is a good woman. I would not put up with that myself, but the world takes all kinds.

On Friday, CleoPatton would not come out of the emu yard when I opened the main gate. Antonelle hung back, but stood alone. This is two-times unusual. He always wants to wander the front yard, she always stays within eyeline of him. So I went looking & found....16 eggs. He did eventually move out through the gate, but the sound or flash of my camera brought him running back. By Friday night he was sitting on them & will not be lured away, not even with apples (apples are how I get them to do anything; they will go anywhere for apples).

Last year, no one sat on the eggs until December 30 & in the end it was her, reluctantly; he just was not ready for fatherhood. We thought we had more time to get some of them away from him, but there is a very real possibility we will have a dozen or so emu babies in February.

If anyone is interested on this variation on lawn flamingos, give me a call.

Emus are easily excited

After several days of hard rain, the emus were very happy to leave their yard & wander the front yard. There is a gate across the driveway & natural barriers along the perimeter, although Cleo has gotten through it more than once.

They tend to stick together & on all but one occasions, when Cleo has gotten out he has stood on one side of the gate in the driveway & she stood on the other. Anxious, but not panicked.

The exception was the last time he got out. Instead of waiting at our gate, he somehow got turned around & was waiting at the gate next door. I had to lure him from that gate to our gate with a scoop full of apples. It took time, not because he does not like apples (they both do) & he definitely understood the follow-the-food technique.

But every time he moved away from the narrow window to the next gate & alongside the underbrush that keeps them from running into the street (ideally), Antonelle thrummed until he would turn back & she could see him again. In the end I had to lure her to our gate & get her to stand there & panic. Then he went straight for her, eating every apple he could find on the way. I opened the gate & she made no attempt to rush out; he walked in & he made purring noises while she groomed her tail-feathers.

When a female emu is alarmed (at least when Antonelle is) she makes a noise that sounds like the opening riff of "These boots were made for walking" I swear. The male sounds like the Velocoraptors in Jurassic Park (the clicking, not the barking).

& they are largely peaceful. They do get frightened & respond in the only way a 100lb bird with a brain the size of bottle of nail polish can: they panic, they try to get away, they panic more. They do snap & fluff at the dog that runs the outside fence of their yard, barking (we don't let her do this, but sometimes she gets away), but mostly they want to be left alone, with each other.

As far as I can see that is their defining characteristic. They are devoted to each other. We have never seen them fight. Not when food was scarce, not when she layed all those eggs & he just would not sit on them (deadbeat!). In the end, she sat on them half-heartedly & he sat next to her.

Cleo does not see well, as I have said in a previous entry, & often snaps her, or food out of her mouth in his attempt to grab something several inches away. We have never seen her snap back.

Emus are especially enamored.

Big birds

Today A confirmed that Cleo is blind in his right eye (yes, his. It turns out, I had them exactly wrong, so now they are CleoPatton & Antonelle). It is hard to say when it happened, if it was even here. When they arrived, he was in the worse shape & didn't move around much for several days. This is how the people looking after him determined "his feet hurt".

The two birds had been enclosed in a smallish pen & fed on a diet of dog food, which I have been reliably informed is the typical diet for backyard emus. This explains why there aren't so very many.

Now I need to decide how to treat it. Not that I think there is a treatment, exactly. The eye is foggy & food placed on that side is ignored. His depth perception is terrible; often Cleo will jab Antonelle trying to grab a leaf more than an inch or two from her head. I hope he doesn't blind her. I am not sure our large animal vet wants to treat large birds; horses are more her line.

Aside from not seeing to the right, he seems happy enough. As happy as a large bird with a small brain can be. We were weeding today & pulled several of the Asteraceae they love &, as usual, stems full of leaves fell at their feet, but only by accident did they stand on them to make pulling the leaves any easier. & only briefly. This is probably what happened to the dinosaurs, too.