That's something you don't hear very often. If ever.
This male brush turkey (Alectura lathami) has taken over the scrubfowl mound. This is A Good Thing. When it comes to construction, turkeys know when to stop. Those scrubfowl were going to keep on building until they had blocked the drive with a leafy, muddy mountain.
The preferred temperature range for incubation is 32 – 36⁰C. Pa Turkey attends every day to ensure that the eggs inside the mound are doing all right. When I took these photos, he was scraping off some of the leaves to cool it down.
Sorry! I forgot to resize this imageThe sex ratio of turkey chicks depends on incubation temperature. At lower temperatures, more males hatch; at higher temperatures, the number of female hatchlings increases. This is a result of embryo mortality rather than temperature-dependent sex determination.
I'm sure the spotted tree monitors (Varanus timorensis) will have already sussed out the mound. I hope that at least some the eggs make it through to hatching. The brush turkeys here are reasonably well behaved.
