Mallee Fowl, The: The Bird That Builds an Incubator

First Edition. pp. 136 illusts #0918

To find the pink eggs of the mallee-fowl the bird watcher – or the hunter – has to take a shovel, for they are buried deep in the soil. And the wonder is that the bird keeps this soil at the same temperature for months on end by a constant sensitive testing of the warmth with his beak and a dawn-to-dark digging and refilling of the mound. This strange hard-working life of the mallee-fowl is described by H. J. Frith, Officer-in-Charge of the Wildlife Survey Section of the C.S.I.R.O., whose long studies of a rare bird at first hand in the dry mallee scrub – years spent with note-book and camera – have become a “research classic””. He tells how the first mound-building bird was reported to Europe by Antonio Pigafetta in 1521