jmgoyder

I now have a really good system happening when I let the emus out of their ‘safe-house’ yard. I park the car, or the ute, outside the gate to the house block and leave the engine running. Then I watch and wait in case the Emerys come sprinting down the driveway. The following picture is looking up the driveway into the farm.

So far, so good, but you never know with these marathon runners! The picture below is of the driveway that leads away from the farm and down to the road. It’s just a small country road but you never know when a truck is going to come through and that’s where the Emerys absconded to the other day. They know they are not allowed down there but, like all teenagers, they like to test the limits. Sometime I have to race them down this driveway in the car, beat them to the road, do a skiddy u-turn and herd them back up. It’s a bit hair-raising for them and for me.

It’s not that they want to get away. After all, they adore me – well, they adore cabbage – and are always perfectly happy to come back to their yard. The whole rigmarole takes a couple of hours!

Someone asked me if I would go back to lecturing at the local university soon but I think the skills I am developing in terms of the emus are equipping me far better for the police force!

Now that the Emerys are growing up, I have decided to stop babying them. For example, even though only one of them prefers lettuce to cabbage, I am feeding them all lettuce on alternate days. The three emus who prefer cabbage have learned the hard way that sometimes it’s only going to be lettuce so, while they wait for the cabbage, the lettuce-loving emu eats all of the lettuce and the fussy ones go without.

I have also stopped chopping lettuce scraps into bite-sized pieces for them, although I still do this with cabbage because I don’t want them to choke. The daily cabbage chopping has given me a blister between the thumb and forefinger of my right hand, and elicits hysterical laughter from friends who happen to drop by when I am doing this ‘cut lunch’ thing, but, well, you know….

Only one of the emus saves her back by bending into a crouch to eat. She was also the first to figure out how to tear a lettuce apart by herself. Of course I am just assuming she is a ‘she’!

Even though they are in a big yard, I don’t like keeping the Emerys so confined but, as you know from previous posts, letting them out of their yard poses risks. For example, about 50 kms north of here, a pet emu was stolen recently. This has made me realize that human predators are much worse than foxes; the incident described in the news item below is distressing.

I’m not so worried about our emus because I have a new method when I let them out for a sprint. I park the car at the end of the driveway near the road just in case they go that way (I don’t want to have to herd them back from our neighbour’s rose garden again!) If only Baby Turkey would stop scaring the hell out of them, they would happily zigzag around the house block but, once Baby Turkey does her ‘fly up and peck the emu in the face’ thing, they all panic.

The other thing that concerns me is the risk of concussion from falling pears. You see, in the emu yard there are two pear trees with great big pears dropping off all the time. Some of these pears are the size of an emu’s head, so what if….?

Also, why don’t they eat the pears? Then I wouldn’t have to keep chopping up the cabbage!

Etcetera!