Brush-turkey fun on a rainy day
October 2006
The most colorful of Australia’s megapodes, or mound builders, the Australian Brush-turkey builds a huge mound of soil and vegetation in which to lay its eggs. Heat produced in this giant compost heap acts as an incubator for the eggs.
We’ve been seeing brush-turkeys around nearly every campground and picnic area we’ve visited so far in Queensland. But nothing could prepare me for the three dozen or so of these large ground-dwelling birds that came strutting out of the woods every evening at our campground near Lake Eacham in the Atherton Tableland. Their aim was to steal the corn put out for the ducks on the pond here, and they were not afraid of people.
One particularly big male, with a large yellow wattle around his neck, spent a lot of time chasing the others trying in vain trying to monopolize the food. I decided to turn the afternoon’s drizzly conditions to my advantage photographically by trying some blurred shots of the turkeys running around, using a slow shutter speed and flash.
Instead of racking up the ISO to get sharp shots in the gloomy light, I set it as low as possible (ISO 100 on my camera), trying a variety of shutter speeds from around 1/30 to 1/2 second. Using a hand-held camera with 300mm IS lens, I panned with the birds as they ran around. Checking my digital captures immediately allowed me to see that the slowest speeds resulted in a blurred shot so abstract you could barely tell that it was a bird! Shots taken at around 1/30 second, as was this one, give a more subtle impression of movement.