The Lava Birds

Meet the Melanesian megapode – an avian species that starts life beneath the warm sands of the volcanic Solomon Islands.

- Mark Cocker

The sound of our boat’s engine drowned out the vast silence of the South Pacific night. It was 4am and pitch black – the only thing I could see distinctly was the whiteness of the breakers crashing and spreading onto the shore. We were on the Solomon Islands, at a place called Savo, to see a bird that lays its eggs in the ground, like a crocodile. The embryos are warmed by the heat of volcanoes. When they hatch, the chicks, alone and unaided, have to scramble up – sometimes through 1.5m of sand – from the nest-grave in which their mothers have buried them. Parent and offspring will never knowingly meet.

The creature in question is called the Melanesian megapode – a ground-dwelling species, about the size of a chicken, with a small head, short brown wings and a spherical body that carries a deep, dark blue-black sheen. Its most notable feature is the size of its legs and feet, which explains that odd name – megapode means ‘big foot’.

Megapodes form a separate ancient family called the Megapodiidae that includes 22 species, which occur from the Indian Ocean across parts of Indonesia, the Philippines and New Guinea, as far as southern Australia, then way out into the central Pacific through the array of islands known as Melanesia. Savo is among that complex of archipelagos and it is no coincidence that this spot, like much of the zone in which megapodes occur, experiences some of the highest levels of seismic activity known on Earth.

Savo is a live volcano and the megapodes have probably exploited the island’s subterranean heat to incubate their eggs for millennia. In turn, the local people have learned to exploit this relationship to supply themselves with some of the most nutritious eggs produced by any avian species.