I’m still on a wildlife kick I’m afraid; there is just so much to see. More touristy things coming for those with patience to stay the course.

The forests of eastern Australia are full of these mounds:

 

 

They can be truly enormous – more than 2m high and 10m diameter, clearly constructed by something, out of soil and leaf litter from the forest floor:

 

 

Are they anthills? No; rubbish dumps, no.

Amazingly they are a bird’s nest! Or more probably, a birds’ nest. There are two mound breeders here, the Australian Brush Turkey Alectura lathami:

 

 

And the Malleefowl or, more prosaically, the Orange Footed Scrubfowl Leipoa ocellata:

 

 

These are both middle-sized birds, the turkey the size of a large hen and the mallefowl moorhen sized, but both as you can see with large feet. The males build these enormous nest mounds merely by scraping the forest litter backwards with their feet. The mallefowl nests are much larger, despite the birds being smaller. They sometimes build co-operatively, sometimes singly. The work can take literally years. Females lay their eggs, often more than one female per mound, and then abandon them. The males bury the eggs in the mound and using the natural heat of the mound’s decomposition to incubate them rather than sitting on them as most birds do. They have temperature sensors in their beaks accurate to a fraction of a degree, and they adjust the amount of covering material over the eggs to ensure it is exactly right for their development. On hatching the young struggle to the surface and are immediately completely independent. Neither parent does anything further to care for them.

It seems to work, brush turkeys in particular are common as muck here, even right into the centre of Brisbane.