What an interesting contribution. Although over the age of 60, I had never heard 'brush' in that sense in my Victorian childhood. However, I knew it from my Cayley (What Bird is That?) where the relevant habitat was described as: 'BRUSHES AND BIG SCRUBS. Dense vegetation of the rain forest type, formed of very tall trees with luxuriant top-foliage, creepers and epiphytes ... Such vegetation is known as "scrub" in Queensland and "brush" and "big-scrub" in New South Wales.'
Gould recorded that this species was the 'Brush-Turkey of the Colonists'. Gould knew the word in the same sense as Cayley later, because he said 'the assaults of the cedar-cutters and others, who frequently hunt through the brushes of Illawarra and Maitland, had nearly extirpated it from those localities' [in 1838] and 'I was agreeably surprised when I found it in the Liverpool brushes'.
My Macquarie dictionary 4th ed gives as the first relevant sense of 'brush': 'a dense growth of bushes, shrubs, etc.; scrub; a thicket'. Sense 4 is 'tall dense rain forest'. Sense 6 is: 'Obsolete bush, surviving in the name of plants or animals as brush turkey'. Macquarie here is surely in error, as the ‘brush’ in Brush Turkey clearly referred to rain forest, not to ‘bush’ in the usual Australian sense.
I might add that the English Names Committee has received no representations to change the name ‘Brush-turkey’, which is used in global lists, for this and related species.
I wonder what Laurie calls the Brush Cuckoo?
-----Original Message-----
From: Birding-Aus <> On Behalf Of Laurie Knight
Sent: Monday, 25 February 2019 10:29 PM
To: Anthea Fleming <>
Cc: Birding Aus <>
Subject: Re: [Birding-Aus] Turkey dust bathing
G’day Anthea
People under the age of 60 don’t use the term brush to describe native vegetation in Queensland (I suspect the term brush is an antique term used by southern colonists). The megapodes in SEQ have always been Bush Turkeys in my lexicon and I will continue to drop the redundant r when I refer to them.
Regards, Laurie
> On 25 Feb 2019, at 7:57 pm, Anthea Fleming <m("labyrinth.net.au","flambeau");">> wrote:
>
> Hi Laurie,
> I have seen a domestic Turkey hen dust bathing - don't recall if she dug a hole or not.
> Bush turkey - do you mean the Brush Turkey, the megapode with yellow or purple wattle round its neck, or what my grandfather called a Bush Turkey or Plains Turkey, i.e. Bustard?
> I have no idea if either dust-bathes. If i remember I might look up HANZAB.
> As a member of the WA Geological Survey, 1910 to 1935, Grandpa ate a lot of Bustards. They were a very welcome change from a diet of tinned bully beef.
>
> Anthea fleming
>
>
> n 25/02/2019 8:09 PM, Laurie Knight wrote:
>> G’day
>>
>> I’ve been coming across some odd holes in the bush tracks in my neighbourhood. They are about 30 cm across and 15 cm deep [not your average bandicoot or pig excavation].
>>
>> I came across a female looking bush turkey sitting in a fresh hole, dug about 100 metres from the nearest active mound. It looked rather dusty, and I suspect it was dusting. Is this a common turkey behaviour?
>>
>> Regards, Laurie.
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