Original air date - A Question of Balance :: 7:30pm 27th Mar 2018

The In Site Giving Insight

Dr John Martin, wildlife ecologist at the Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney, explains the branching out of their Wingtags citizen science project to include brush turkeys.

Brush turkeys are an old world bird as evidenced from their use of incubation mounds rather than nests. The male birds build mounds that look like mulch (5m round and 1m high) and incubate the eggs that females lay. This is an old nesting behaviour that modern birds don’t use. Also known as bush turkeys or scrub turkeys, brush turkeys actually occur from the Illawarra region all the way north to Cape York. They were found all over the Sydney region but humans changed the landscape and introduced predators, including themselves. Brush turkeys were hunted in colonial settlement and their eggs were also a food source. Today in Sydney’s urban landscape there are threats from cats, dogs, foxes and cars.

Anecdotally the brush turkey population has been recolonising areas where they used to occur, often in parallel with fox management by local councils. There is similar anecdotal evidence for increasing numbers of lyrebirds, swamp wallabies and bandicoots in areas where there has been persistent fox control. Brush turkeys and their eggs are a protected species which has also helped them recolonise, so while they are sometimes considered a menace (as they like to forage and build mound in lawns and gardens) anyone concerned should contact their local council for advice.

Technology is fundamental to the Wingtag research which Matthew Hall, a PhD student at Sydney University, will be doing over the next 3-4 years. Some birds have already been marked with yellow plastic wing tags and marking will continue across the region for the next few years. Transmitters will be put on birds using a backpack harness with a solar panel and the mobile phone network will be used to communicate the data. There is a particular interest in the GPS of nest mounds as motion-activated cameras will be used to monitor them over the years. This will provide evidence on male behaviour, egg hatching, how many females are laying eggs and the proximity to other mounds.

All reported sightings can be done via the Wingtag app (Google Wingtag app) although Matthew can also be contacted by email (brush.turkey2@gmail.com) with sightings or questions. Sightings are not just restricted to tagged birds. People can report untagged birds, nest mounds and nocturnal roosts, as well as dead birds (when the site questions are altered) as this will give data about the whole population.

The project will provide data on how brush turkeys survive and how they move across the urban landscape. When the eggs hatch the chicks are independent and have no parental involvement so the project will also shed light on how the little chicks survive in urban areas with cats, dogs, foxes and cars. The data should show if there are different adaptations and behaviours in different bush and urban habitats and whether the same birds roost together all the time.

There might also be insight into how brush turkey interactions with the landscape change natural processes. The raking of leaf litter to make mounds is thought to increase the speed of leaf litter decomposition, speeding up that natural cycle. Raking may also stimulate plant germination, a mechanism that hasn’t been in the landscape for a long time.

Wingtags, then, is an important citizen science initiative. It’s an in site giving insight into many aspects of our native brush turkeys.