It sounds crazy, but it could work, Lishman says. You can get them to follow a radio-controlled truck if that's the only thing they know. It's the size and shape, and the noise, that they're used to. They want to stick with whatever they are familiar with because it hasn't hurt them. While cranes imprint on whatever animal they see at birth, birds in the family Megapodiidae, which live in Australia and nearby islands, know their species instinctively.
Adults have nothing to do with their young after hatching.
Instead, megapods build mounds or burrows that capture solar or geothermal heat, or are warmed by decaying vegetation. The mounds, built from sand, dirt and vegetation, can be 13 meters in diameter and more than 2 meters high. After the parents create a mound, the female lays eggs. Then the parents depart, leaving the young to burrow out of the mound and immediately start raising themselves. In an approach that may appeal to stressed-out human parents, the parents apparently never lift a feather to help their young, yet at mating time, genetic programming enables the young to recognize their own species.