Turkey Trot

Well, Turkey Day is upon us, and come the morrow, I'll be throwing mine in the roasting pan.  

I know a lot of people don't like turkey, but I'm not one of them. I much enjoy an occasional turkey dinner - mashed potatoes, stuffing (with plenty of Bell's Seasoning in it), gravy, cranberry sauce, squash, etc. - and I really love the leftovers. I'm already looking forward to Friday's sandwich. 

What's not to like about a sandwich, made using bread, that also contains a layer of stuffing. Carbo packing at its finest. Yummy!

My turkey, of course, began and likely ended its life on a turkey farm. And it was no doubt a white, domestic turkey. 

I don't actually think I've ever seen a domestic turkey IRL. But over the last decade or so I've seen plenty of wild turkeys.

I remember the first time I saw one.

It was a Sunday. Summertime. I was leaving the Cape with my brother and niece, and we were in stall-and-crawl traffic on Route 6, heading off the Cape. While we were stalling, my brother pointed out that a turkey was making its way through the stalled traffic a car ahead of us.

"This will not end well," he predicted.

He was right.

Traffic west was barely moving. Traffic east was sparse, and moving fast. 

Our turkey hopped over the barrier separating the Mid Cape Highway West from the Mid Cape Highway East and met his fate. Blood, guts, feathers. The turkey parts were flying. 

Why did the turkey cross the road? To get to the other side? Not this guy!

Fortunately, we were a couple of cars away, so there was only a little blood and no guts on Rich's windshield 

Turkeys on the Cape are one thing. There are a lot of wooded areas, especially flanking the highway.

But Massachusetts turkeys are not confined to the Cape, or to our more rural necks of the woods. These days, they're all over the Boston metro, and they're a terrible, nasty invasive species.

Most of the ones I see are in Brookline, a Boston close-in suburb where my sister Kath lives. 

Brookline has been infested for a good long time now.

The wild turkeys travel in packs, and sometimes there's a gang of young turkey thugs waiting at the Beaconsfield T-stop so they can stalk some hapless detraining passenger. 

I've had them follow me out, and I can never remember the rules of engagement. Don't make eye contact? Stare them down? Unfurl an umbrella and wave it at them? Wave your arms and make threatening noises? Curl up in fetal position and hope they pass you by?

I find myself hovering at as much of a distance I can maintain from them  - that they'll allow me to maintain from them - and text my brother-in-law, who's always up on the latest.

With grim regularity, there are articles in the paper, news spots on TV, reporting on the latest turkey assault and battery incident in Boston and its environs. The pregnant woman who was attacked. The older man cornered on his porch. The cars that are having their wheel coverings and doors pecked in. A rafter of turkeys waddling across the street. 

These turkeys, they're aggressive. They're ugly. They're everywhere. A couple of summers ago, I even saw one in a tree in my couldn't-be-more-urban neighborhood. A (turkey) pox on their houses. Or nests. Or perches. Or wherever they live.

Wild turkeys! Ugh! Second only to Canada geese on my list of despised fauna. 

And Boston isn't the only place that's turkey plagued. Across the country, they're showing up where they didn't used to be showing up, and where they're not all that welcome.

One place they're showing up is Madison, Wisconsin, where photojournalist Anne Readel became intrigued by their courtship displays.  So she began taking pictures and (wish) boning up on turkeys. The result was a recent article in the New York Times. 

Reading Readel, I learned that male turkeys, or toms, "form lifelong flocks with their brothers...These bands of brothers cooperated to court females, or hens, and chase off competing males." Reproductively, only the alpha male in the flock gets the girl. The roles of the others are confined to being "wingmen" or "backup dancers." (Come on, let me see you shake your tail feather, baby.)

It's not one big tail-shaking, wing-spreading love fest, of course. The turkey boys all vie to become the alpha male. 

While males are aggressive with each other, they aren’t aggressive toward females and do not force copulations, despite being twice the size of their mating partners. So while males may strut with abandon, females ultimately choose their mates. They’re picky about partners and know what they want: males with long snoods.

Snoods are the fingerlike fleshy protuberances that flop over a turkey’s beak. The animals can contract and relax muscles and blood vessels in their head and neck, causing changes in the organ’s length and color. A tom sporting a long red snood draws the attention of hens like flies to honey — although, to their credit, the hens manage to be coy about it.

The article goes on, and on, as to why having a "killer snood" and other properties makes evolutionary sense.  

TMI... 

But let's talk some turkey. Conservation efforts to protect wild turkeys have paid off. In spades. And now they're a menace, flocks of pesky pests. Maybe it's  time to do a bit of de-conserving.