What is an Australian brush turkey?
The Australian brush turkey is a large ground-dwelling bird with black feathers, a bare red head and a yellow or purple wattle. It is famous for building huge mounds of leaves and soil to incubate its eggs.
Brush turkeys live in rainforests and wet forests along eastern Australia, from Cape York to the New South Wales south coast. They have adapted well to suburban gardens in cities such as Brisbane and Sydney.
Despite their name, they are not closely related to turkeys. They belong to a group of birds called megapodes, meaning large feet.
Mound builders
The male builds a mound up to about four metres wide and one metre high by raking leaf litter and soil. The heat from decomposing material warms the eggs.
The male checks the temperature of the mound with his beak and adds or removes material to keep it at around 33 degrees Celsius. Females lay eggs in the mound, and the chicks hatch and dig their way out, able to survive alone.
In suburbs, brush turkeys sometimes dig up gardens to build their mounds, frustrating gardeners. They are protected by law, so they cannot be harmed. Their population has increased in some urban areas in recent decades.