This is a story best told in Douglas Adams' delightful voice.
But, if you don't have the time or motivation to listen to a few minutes of adventure, here's the transcription.
"I have a well-deserved reputation for being something of a gadget freak. And I'm rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me ten seconds to do by hand. Time is valuable, and ten seconds worth of it is well worth the investment of a day's happy activity working out a way of saving it.
The bird we came across was called a megapode, and it has a very similar outlook on life. It looks a little like a lean, spritely chicken. Though it has an advantage over chickens that it can fly, if a little heavily, and is therefore better able to escape from dragons, which can only fly in fairy stories--and in some of the nightmares through which I was plagued while trying to sleep on Kimodo.
The important thing is that the megapode has worked out a wonderful labour saving device for itself. The labour it wishes to save is the time-consuming activity of sitting on its nest all day, incubating its eggs, when it could be out and about doing things. I have to say at this point that we didn't actually come across the bird itself, though we thought we glimpsed one scuttling through the undergrowth. We did, however, come across its labour-saving device, which is something that is hard to miss.
It was a conical mound of thickly packed earth and rotting vegetation. About 6 feet high, and 6 feet wide at its base. In fact, it was considerably higher than appeared, because the mound would've been built on a hollow in the ground, which would itself have been about 3 feet deep.
I just spent a cheerful hour of my time writing a program on my computer that would tell me instantly what the volume of the mound was. It's a very neat and sexy program, with lots of popup menus and things, and the advantage of doing it the way I have is that in on any future occasion on which I need to know the volume of the megapode nest, given its basic dimensions, my computer will tell me the answer in less than a second, which is a wonderful saving of time! The downside, I suppose, is that I cannot conceive of any future occasion that I am likely to need to know the volume of a megapode nest...but, no matter! The volume of this mound is a little over 9 cubic yards.
What the mound is, is an automatic incubator. The heat generated by the chemical reactions of the rotting vegetation keeps the eggs that are buried deep inside it warm. And not merely warm! By judicious additions or subtractions of material to the mound, the megapode is able to keep it at the precise temperature which the eggs require in order to incubate properly.
So, all the megapode has to do to incubate its eggs is merely to dig 3 cubic yards of earth off the ground, fill it with 3 cubic yards of rotting vegetation, collect a further 6 cubic yards of vegetation, build it into a mound, and then, continually monitor the heat it's producing and run about adding bits or taking bits away. And thus, it saves itself all the bother, of sitting on its eggs from time to time.
This cheered me up immensely."
The next time you're tasked with a big, hairy ball of mud on your task list, ask yourself..."Am I being a Megapode?"
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