A China Story. Ian and Anji: February 2010

Here in Killcare, we are blessed with many native birds and animals.
I may have already put up some photos of the parrots that often fill our back yard, much to Anji's delight.

But there is one native bird that is pretty well hated by all residents here and that is our native bush turkey.

Our bush Turkeys are real turkeys. There are a bit smaller than the American variety and are mainly black and don't have the distinctive "gobble-gobble" call. They just grunt.

Bush Turkeys build a large mound of leaves and sticks, perhaps one metre high and about 2 metres in diameter. They lay their eggs inside the mound and let the natural heat, generated by the decaying vegetation, incubate the eggs.
They will defend the mound from predators, such as monitor lizards, by flicking sticks with a backwards movement with their feet.

They live on berries and seeds and, mainly, on grubs they dig up by using the same scratching technique that chickens use.

It is this scratching method of finding food that brings them into conflict with anyone who lives in this wooded area and wants to have a garden.
They can destroy anyone's well organised garden in a few minutes. About one and a half times the size of a normal chicken, they have feet about the size of a human hand. Plant some seeds and go inside for a cuppa, come out 30 minutes later and all you hard work will have been undone.

Before I went to China about 7 years ago, they weren't as big a problem.
You see, those lovely Brits decided they wanted to continue the proud old tradition of fox hunting in Australia way back in the colonial days.
The problem was, we don't, sorry, didn't, have foxes in Australia. So they imported them. The foxes said thank you because Australia was like a smorgasbord of small animals who had never had a natural predator before.

They have been doing a great deal of damage to our small native possums, ground feeding parrots and turkeys, especially the chicks, which start looking after themselves when very small.

The government decided something had to be done so a campaign of baiting commenced in known fox areas. Ours is one, having many areas of national park around us.

The baiting has been very successful and now the turkeys are able to multiply at a rapid rate.

They have a daily route to where ever they go during the day and that is across the road in front of my neighbour's house, up onto my roof and then jump into the other neighbour's yard or often mine.

And so all our gardens tend to look the same as you will see in the photos at the end of this posting.

We can't do anything to the turkeys because they are protected, as are all our native species and rightly so.

But occasionally, a driver might "Not see them" if they run across the road.

So here are the photos of our beloved ??? turkeys.

By the way, Anji and I worked in our yard today doing some trimming and cleaning for the last day of summer. It was fairly hot and tiring work so, at five o'clock, Anji ran me a lovely hot bath with bath salts, brought in a glass of chilled Ozzie white wine with some salami. Ah! I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight?

Cheers
Ian