Unexpected Visitors

We had some unexpected guests today at the Outback Dobbs household:

This emu and it’s baby were out in our front yard eating away.  The emus have been coming into our neighborhood from the surrounding bush looking for food.  I really don’t mind them.  They are fun to look at despite being one of the ugliest birds in the animal kingdom. 

However, their babies are cute though:

What is interesting about the emus is that the father takes care of the offspring.  After the mother lays her eggs she takes off to look for another male emu to hang out with while the male sits on the eggs.  The male will sit on the eggs for eight weeks until they hatch, only surviving off of it’s body fat.  Once the eggs are hatched the father will continue to take care of the chicks.  The father defends the chicks and teaches them how to look for food.  The father will take care of the chicks for about 18 months and then they are ready to go off on their own.  I have actually seen an emu taking care of nine chicks before.  While the dad is walking along I counted nine little chicks following him like ducks in a row.  I wish I had my camera on me that day because it was pretty cool. 

This emu that pop up in my front yard had only this one chick with him.  I walked outside to take pictures of them and the large emu came head right to me.  This emus are large animals so I backed away from him and he kept coming at me.  I backed off all the way to my front door and he kept coming at me. 

Here is the emu walking up the drive way towards me; you can see the baby emu just to his right:

I stepped inside the house and he walked up to the front door and just looked at me and then walked back down the drive way.  It seemed like he was just curious, but it is a large wild animal so I wasn’t about to go and try to pet it or anything.  The two of them hung out in my yard for about 10 minutes before taking off again.  The one bad thing about emus though is that they leave almost cow paddy like crap when they need to go.  It is a pain in the butt to clean if they crap on the drive way because we can’t use water to clean our drive way because of the water restrictions.  So I have to wait until it dries and then take a rake to it to break it up and then sweep it away. 

However, it is a small inconvenience to pay for the chance to see one of Australia’s unusual animals.