Turkeys on the march

Turkeys on the march

One of Australia's most bizarre birds has been steadily expanding its range for decades 

The Australian brush turkey, bush turkey or scrub turkey

I was surprised on one of my regular lunchtime walking loops around Milsons Point/Kirribilli recently. There, within a few hundred metres of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, about 20m from the water itself, was a brush turkey. It was doing what brush turkeys do best - wrecking a garden by scraping all the loose vegetation, living plants and anything else, into a huge mound. I had to laugh. Even there, in some of the most expensive real estate in the country, a wild creature was causing havoc.

Brush turkey in Kirribilli, near Sydney Harbour.

When I was a kid, brush turkeys, or bush turkeys as some people call them, were rarely seen on most bush walks around Sydney. 

Occasionally in the deep recesses of a rainforest we'd see them, but in the 1970s, the furthest south their range reached was what is now Wollemi National Park, in the northern Blue Mountains. Brush turkeys are known up the east coast all the way to the Cape York Peninsula in northern Queensland, and have been wreaking havoc in Brisbane backyards for as long as most people can remember. There they were (and still are) considered a pest by many residents.
A couple of decades ago, they began to move into the Central Coast of NSW in bigger numbers, and started to annoy people there. Their march has continued south, through Sydney and down past the Illawarra. They particularly love rainforests and wet, leafy, shady environments, but will make do with the lovely mulch on offer in most gardens.
Nowadays, on pretty much any bushwalk around Sydney, the Blue Mountains, or any coastal area north of Jervis Bay, I encounter brush turkeys. They waddle around, usually quite unperturbed by humans (unless you are running, in which case they stupidly run ahead of you), building their vast nest mounds, which average about 4m across and 1–2m high.
I've actually loved this change – seeing such a large, wild animal up close regularly is to me quite a joy. So much of our wildlife is skittish, only seen at night, or small (or all three), and it is wonderful to see these big black fowl (they grow to 75cm in length), with their red heads and yellow wattles, going about their business.

In spring and summer you can also see the gorgeous little brown chicks running through the scrub. 

There are some 22 mound-building birds in the world, and Australia has three of them: the brush turkey, the orange-footed scrubfowl (only in far northern Australia), and the rare arid-zone species, the malleefowl. All of them are bizarre in that they build these extraordinary mounds which are specifically designed to reach a very precise temperature – in the case of the brush turkey, 33°C. The male (who nearly always builds the nest) regularly takes mouthfuls of the rotting compost pile in the mound in order to determine the temperature, via a sensitive thermometer inside his mouth, then will adjust the mound by adding more material, or stripping it away to raise or lower the temperature.
About 16 eggs are laid into this massive mound, and the poor chicks, when they hatch seven weeks later, have to dig themselves out, and immediately fend for themselves. They can fly almost straight away, although they usually spend their days on the ground and only fly to a roost at night.
Now, I love them, but I understand I don't have any in my beautiful garden causing a ruckus (my three chooks do that already).
Evidently, once they have decided to build a mound, you are destined to have a mound whether you want one or not. Rather than continually trying to destroy the mound, or shoo away the bird, you are better (according to all the advice) to provide a spot for them, with plenty of mulch and shade, and then to use rocks or gravel for mulch in the rest of your garden, hoping that they'll leave the rest of your garden alone. I'd be keen to know if this works, or if you have any other stories of interactions with these birds.
Brush turkeys have had much of their natural habitat taken away and are still extinct in some areas of their original range. In so many ways, I'm delighted that these wild, bizarre creatures are coming back to some areas that were originally theirs to start with. Maybe we can get emus back next...
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