Brush turkey

We've had brush turkeys hanging around near our place for a couple of years now and this year they've chosen to build their nest in the front yard of one of our neighbours.



There's an access path that runs down between their place and the next to the bush reserve behind our houses (we're a couple of houses further down), so there's plenty of material for the birds to work with and the mound is quite an impressive size.

Brush turkey on top of mound



The nest



The rest of the nest



I took a short video too, nothing special but I thought I'd throw it up here anyway.



The turkey scratched its way to the fence and then headed on up and over into the backyard of the next house.



As I was coming back from taking these photos I feel into conversation with the owner of that backyard. Apparently the turkey had been doing some heavy duty work in her yard and had done a great job collecting all the fallen debris from the lawn with the clear intention of adding it to the nest. Of course there was the minor detail of a fence in the way so after all that hard work it'd had to leave the mulch piled up against the fence. My neighbour scooped it all up and chucked it in her green bin (for garden waste), she's quite pleased, it saved her a whole heap of work :)