0°C | Tuesday April 29, 2025 
21 June 2024
By Hannah Wilcox
Residents are encouraged to take early action as North Sydney’s regular visitors, the brush turkeys, enter breeding season.
Typically from June or July to December, the native birds look to settle down and create nest mounds – often in backyards.
Brush turkey expert and senior ecologist John Martin acknowledged the bird’s prehistoric nesting behaviour often causes angst for residents, but said they needed to be respected.
“Brush turkeys are a large native bird that can cause really big disturbances to people’s backyards,” he said.
“The male builds this huge nest mound and this is the source of conflict. One male will build this huge nest mound (from) three to four tonnes of leaf litter and soil.”
Martin added: “That’s where the females will come and assess his quality and decide if they want to mate with him and lay their eggs.”
Residents are encouraged to contact councils or national parks if they need advice on how to manage brush turkeys.
“We need to have better management strategies that allow us to live with the wildlife,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald.
“It’s an interesting challenge because lots of us want to live in leafy bushy areas. We don’t actually get to decide which native animals choose to live in their habitat.”
Rendered locally extinct in the area during the Great Depression, hunted for their meat and eggs, brush turkeys are now protected under the NSW Biodiversity Conservation Act.
North Sydney Council has encouraged those who wish to deter the local brush turkey population from nesting in their properties to take early action, as once a mound is built and a female is visiting it is an offence to interfere.
One way to work around the breeding season is to encourage the creation of nest mounds in a less sensitive part of the garden to avoid territorial males.
A second recommendation includes attempting to move the bird on when it first shows signs of nesting at a site by spraying it early in the morning with a short burst of water from a garden sprinkler, a hand-held hose or spray bottle. Aiming only for the chest, locals are warned to not harm the brush turkey.
Other tactics include pegging a cover over the mound, pruning overhanging branches to increase sunlight and using different ground cover such as river gravel, large eucalypt sticks or by placing obstacles such as rocks.
It comes as the long-running conflict between North Sydney locals and the brush turkeys boiled over in September last year.
Two brush turkeys and several pigeons died after a suspected poisoning near the Allan Border Oval at The Crescent in Mosman.
Resident Julia Rankin found the brush turkeys “convulsing” outside her home.
“To see these beautiful brush turkeys, with the red and yellow on their necks, convulsing and falling over, it was very sad,” she said at the time.
“Then a man walking his dog came past and said he had already seen 10 dead pigeons this morning.”
Suspected pellet bait was found scattered across the oval and was safely collected by Fire and Rescue NSW.
Cremorne Vet treated the two brush turkeys with suspicion the birds had been poisoned.
More information on brush turkeys, including ways to ethically and responsibly deter them from your garden, can be found on the NSW Environment and Heritage website.