The Good, the Bad, and the Emus(63)

He parked the truck, and we both got out and peered around.

“If this was February, when they’d gotten used to being fed here, they’d be lined up waiting for us,” he said. “Let’s put the grain out.”

He hopped out of the truck, lowered its tailgate, and hefted one of the fifty-pound sacks of feed. I followed his example, a little awkwardly thanks to the bandages on my left hand.

“I can get them both if you like,” he said.

“I’m fine,” I replied.

I might have let him handle both sacks if I’d known he was going to carry them across the ford in the stream and over to the other side of the clearing. We couldn’t have hauled them over in the truck and then turned around? Or for that matter, spread out the grain on the near side of the stream?

But I concentrated on not dropping the sack, and we came to a stop beside what I assumed was an emu feeding station. It was an eight-foot-long trough set high off the ground. Its eight legs were protected with baffles, similar to those birders used to keep the squirrels off their feeders. There was a roof to protect the grain from precipitation. I couldn’t quite understand why it had bars running from the trough to the roof all the way around, so I asked Thor.

“The emus can fit their heads through the space between the bars,” he said, “but it’s too small for deer. Ms. Delia’s idea, and it worked pretty well.”

“Not a fan of deer, Ms. Delia?”

“They ate her garden,” he said with a grin. “She used to say there were enough fat, lazy deer in the world without our helping them.”

Thor climbed up a couple of rough steps built at one end of the trough, and I handed up the bags to him. When he was finished spreading the feed with a battered old rake that had been left lying in the trough, he picked up something that was hanging by a rope. It looked like a crudely made tomtom with a padded drumstick.

“My emu lure,” he said.

He began pounding the tomtom in a two-beat rhythm: Thump thump! Thump thump! Thump thump!

After a while he stopped and cocked his head to listen.

“Nothing yet,” he said. “Let’s go across the stream and wait a while.”

“So emus like percussion instruments?” I asked, as we walked.

“Emus are percussion instruments,” he said. “They make a booming, thumping noise a lot like that drum. And also a growling noise, but I can’t do that, and anyway it wouldn’t carry very far.”

“So when they hear that, they’ll think another emu is here and come running?”

“Or maybe they just think, ‘hey, that crazy human who brings the goodies is playing his drum again,’” he said, with a chuckle. “They seem to come when I do it. But they could be at the other side of the park right now. We might have to bring grain up for a few days to get them used to showing up here.”

“Or maybe not,” I said. “Look!”

Thor whirled and then froze, staring at the head that had suddenly appeared out of the thicket.

“Awesome,” he murmured. Without taking his eyes off the emu, he reached into his pocket, took out his cell phone, and began snapping pictures of it.

I slowly lifted my binoculars to my eyes and trained them on the emu.

A knobby head that wouldn’t have been out of place on a dinosaur topped a long, slender neck. Both head and neck were feathered, but sparsely, so the emu’s blue skin showed through. And its eyes were a bright coppery orange. The head swiveled left and then right. Not the prettiest bird I’d ever seen, but as Thor had said, awesome.

Then it stepped out of the shrubbery and began picking its way delicately across the clearing toward the trough.

“That could be Liz,” he said.

“The emu?”

“Short for Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” he said. “Ms. Delia had names for all of them. She could recognize them from pretty far away.”

As we watched, Liz picked her way across the clearing to the emu feeder. For something so large she moved with curious grace. Her head and body bobbed with each step in a kind of swaying rhythm like a camel.

Thump thump! Thump thump!

I glanced over at Thor, but he wasn’t playing his drum. He was staring openmouthed at the emu.

I looked back at Liz and saw her throat swelling out with each thump.

Liz stopped at the trough and stared down her bill at us for a few long moments. Then she arched her long, slender neck and slipped her head through the bars to the feeder.

“They’re coming,” Thor murmured.

Two more emus were stepping out into the clearing. They thumped and growled a bit and then they headed for the feeding trough. Liz pulled her head out of the trough, raised it up as high as she could reach, and took a few running steps toward the approaching emus, hissing all the while. They fled, and circled around to approach the other end of the trough, giving Liz a wide berth.