The newest paddie

This is Crinkle Cut's new joey. Since he left mum's pouch, I've only spotted him a few times, although mum remains a daily visitor. I was worried that he had gone the way of his older sister — flattened by a neighbour's car — so it was delightful to see him today. I'm not sure he felt the same way about the brush turkey.

Hooray for the brush turkeys!

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 image

The 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.

More snakes and ladders

Well, only one. Another splendid carpet python has taken a liking to the ladder at the back of the house. This one was resting while it digested a substantial meal. It always amazes me what snakes can swallow. Look at the size of the head compared to the 'lump'!

Here's the photo of a bigger python (2.7 m) from a while back in a similar pose.