RIC NATTRASS: This bird is the Australian brush-turkey, technically known as Alectura lathami. Interestingly, it belongs to one of the smallest families of birds in the whole of the bird world. There's about 7,000 species of birds on the planet and this family contains only 12 members of the family. They're called 'megapodes', meaning 'big foot'.
The story of the brush-turkey in South-East Queensland particularly is one of the most intriguing in natural history in this country... in European history of this country. By the 1950s, early '60s, the brush-turkey in my city... I was born in Brisbane. ..in my city, was incredibly rare. In fact, I didn't see one until I was 15 years of age because the backyard style in those days was very English - very European or very Mediterranean, you know? Everything was mown short, there was no canopy, there was no overhanging trees, there was no shade. It was really quite silly, actually. For a subtropical climate, we had the most ridiculous backyards. And so by the time we'd got to there, we had really reduced the preferred habitat of the brush-turkey down to almost nil. And then in the late '60s - mid '60s, late '60s - something strange happened. You got this group called the Society for Growing Australian Plants, and these people were advocating that we make our backyards look a lot more like subtropical rainforest, or wet sclerophyll rainforest, which was largely what Brisbane was all about. So as people changed the backyard, providing heaps of mulch, providing big shade trees - that, and also sprinklers, you know, all that - this was a huge change in the turkeys' life. The turkey was being handed back a facsimile of its preferred habitat and, of course, it responded - out of the little moist gullies where it had been hiding for 40 or 50 or 60 years into the backyards, scratching around.
I published a book a couple of years ago and devoted an entire chapter to the Australian brush-turkey and the chapter - the name of the chapter - is 'Turkish delight'. I actually love the bird because they're one of those species that aren't afraid of human beings because once they reach adulthood, once the brush-turkey has survived that chance of 1-in-200 survival in the first three or four months, once it gets there, it doesn't have any enemies. Well, any real enemies. But those that it does have, it knows it can escape easily. You ever seen them run? If they need a little bit of extra afterburn, a boost, they flap their wings a couple of times, and their tail, and they just disappear. So they can handle predation easily. They're unafraid once they're adults. If you look at it from a wildlife recovery - a species recovery - it is one of Australia's greatest success stories. This bird is now found throughout the capital of Queensland - in Brisbane. It is now found everywhere it was in pre-European Australia in 1824. It's back and we did it and we should be congratulated for doing it.