You head out for your morning coffee and who’s this red-headed fella you keep bumping into? Why, it’s a brush turkey, and there’s a reason you’re seeing more and more of them popping up all over Sydney. The Australian brush turkey was all but extinct back in the 1930s, but recent research published in the Wildlife Research journal has found that these curious birds are having a huge resurgence in urban areas. Yup, Sydney is in its brush turkey era.
Brush turkeys were hunted and roasted for dinner at a rapid rate in the Depression, yet since legislation declared the birds a native species in the 1970s, they’ve been rapidly increasing in population across Sydney.
The resurgence has been a while in the making, but it's been a rather extraordinary bounce-back from near extinction. Dr Matthew Hall, an urban ecologist at the University of Sydney, said research shows when the brush turkey boom hit our city. He told the ABC they “became really common in northern Sydney in the 2000s and 2010s."
Now, in 2024, they can be found in around 312 Sydney suburbs – which is most likely why you’ve bumped into a few on your daily constitutional.
Besides becoming an official native species, ecologists have been keen to pinpoint exactly why these yellow-necked birds have had such a spectacular return from being all but gone. One such theory behind their resurgence is the fact that by nature they practice sustainability habits – they’re more than happy to scrounge for discarded food and they’re not fussy about picking up loose bits to create their nests. In other words, one man’s trash is a brush turkey's treasure.This industrious attitude has seen them thrive in urban areas around both Sydney and Brisbane.
Brush turkeys can be pretty annoying to many residents – have you ever seen a brush turkey nest? They build a big mound that can take over your garden, and because they're protected, there's not a lot you can do about that. The upside, though, is that this is a big success story in conservation circles.
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