Of all birds, the members of the brush turkey family show what is perhaps the most interesting and certainly the most curious type of nesting. There are several genera and species of birds in this family, and their method of nest-building is of varying degrees of primitiveness. That of the mallee is the simplest. These birds simply bury their eggs in sandy ground, where they are hatched by the sun. The mallee fowl makes a mound of leaves, sand, sticks and stones, which may be 3ft. high and as much as 14ft. in diameter.
In this mound the eggs are laid, and are hatched not so much by the sun as by the heat of fermentation of the vegetable matter. The mound of the brush turkey is larger and contains more leaves and less sand than that of the mallee fowl; it may be up to 6ft. high and at least 15ft. in diameter. The largest mounds of all are built by the scrub fowl; these may reach 8ft. in height and 25ft, in diameter, and may weigh several tons, At Whipsnade a male brush turkey with his two or three wives has lived in the bird sanctuary for some years, and in that time has scratched up several mounds with his powerful feet, working backwards through the rides in the wood. The 1937 mound was by no means unusual in size, but weighed 5 tons and took a whole morning to cart away. The male does all the work ju building the mound, and the females merely scratch holes in it in which they lay their eggs, usually pointed end downwards, after seven weeks or more the eggs hatch and, though they may be helped out of the mound by one or other of the parents, the young are immediately independent and have such highly developed primaries that they can leave the ground on the day on which they are hatched, There can be no other bird which can fly as soon as it is hatched.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.