LETTER FROM BOBOLINK FARM
THE NATIVE BIRD
By Barbara Tatham Johnson
The wild turkey families that my husband and I saw through the summer merged
into a single flock as cold weather approached. The group numbered five
adults and twelve youngsters. They visited the meadow to feed on insects and
grass seed heads, and when they were closer to the house, we admired their
plumage through the spotting scope. The deep iridescent green, blue, red,
and purple of their neck and back feathers and the black feather tips
contrasted with the bald ugliness of their heads. We watched their efficient
feeding. The birds hunched low with necks extended and swung their heads
side-to-side, stripping seeds from the meadow plants or snapping up
grasshoppers with their impressive beaks, all the while moving with a
rocking stately pace. They seemed to be a line of yeomen mowing with
scythes. My imagination often configured the flock into a herd of dinosaurs
grazing prehistoric plains, their progress appeared so timelessly simple.
We viewed these big birds at all times of the day throughout September. One
afternoon I heard the clear fluid turkey alarm call that John Burroughs
perfectly described as “Quit! Quit!” The turkeys gathered along the path
between the meadow and stream. One or two of the youngsters hopped about
nervously, and all the flock craned their necks to look at something
alarming hidden in the brushy streamside growth. They moved rapidly back and
forth in a group. Curious, I crossed the stream out of sight of the flock
and circled toward them. The turkeys had hurried away into the woods, and,
I, attempting to catch up, surprised a neighbor’s cat crouched next to the
path. The cat raced homeward. His chance of catching a wild turkey, a bird
continually alert and quick to react to danger, was nil. When alarmed into
flight, wild turkeys easily reach the top branches of tall trees. They roost
as flocks high in trees at night, safe from most predators. The great horned
owl is a threat, but when the presence of an owl is detected, alerted
turkeys stoop low on their perches and tilt their tails over their backs so
that the striking owl glances off with little more than a few feathers in
his talons.
In the first light of day a few mornings ago, we watched the turkeys warily
sharing the meadow with a coyote, who seemed aware that he had little chance
of catching a turkey once the birds sensed his presence. He dined on a sure
thing, nosing out the bodies of voles and other meadow dwellers crushed in
the previous day’s mowing. He circled and pulled out edibles from the hay,
maintaining all the while, an almost constant thirty foot distance from the
alert turkeys. They seemed more curious than frightened, although a sudden
change in the coyote’s movement sent a few youngsters into fluttering leaps.
We could hear no sound from the birds since we were inside the house on the
opposite side of the meadow, but the body language of the young turkeys
implied they could be asking, “Can we go now, Ma?” Slowly the adults guided
the flock to a woods path on the side of the meadow. Not once did they drop
their alert attention. The coyote, it was clear, remained acutely aware of
the turkeys’ positions as he rummaged through the hay. When the last turkey
strutted into the woods, the coyote moved to the wood edge farther along the
meadow and moments later disappeared into the shadows.
Recently, my husband knelt in the garden picking beans. The row of plants
grew higher than his bent back. Beside the beans, the ferny heights of
asparagus plants gone to seed rose three-feet high. My husband sensed the
presence of something and looked up to see the knobby heads of two wild
turkeys peering through the curtain of asparagus at him. He continued
picking beans, and the turkeys left, he thought. A while later when he stood
to stretch and move out of the garden, he startled the whole turkey flock
crouched low beyond the asparagus. The big birds were apparently waiting to
visit the garden and feed on insects. The turkeys scattered in all
directions with a loud yodel of noise. One bird flew two hundred feet to a
pine tree on the meadow edge.
In his book, New England’s Rarities Discovered, published in 1672,
John Josselyn noted “and I have also seen three score broods of young
Turkies on the side of a marsh, sunning of themselves in a morning betimes,
but this was thirty years since, the English and the Indian having now
destroyed the breed, so that ’tis very rare to meet with a wild Turkie in
the woods…” By the nineteenth century, wild turkeys were extinct in New
England.
The Aztecs domesticated the turkey, and the Spanish brought some of this
stock of birds back to Europe after their conquest of Central and South
America. Over time meaty breeds were developed. Some of these birds were
brought to North America in the white settlement of the seventeenth century
in a kind of curious variation of the return of the native.
The beauty and intelligence of the native wild turkey remained legendary in
frontier America. Benjamin Franklin thought the wild turkey a better
symbolic representative of the nation with its rugged, wily, woods-smart
image than the scavenger bald eagle.
In time, the hope that the wild turkey might be re-introduced into New
England became more a reality than a dream. A few wild birds of the original
winter hardy wild turkey species of the Northeast survived in remote areas
of Pennsylvania. In the late 1920s, wildlife managers in that state began a
program to breed wild turkey toms to domestic hen turkeys of breeds that
remained similar to wild birds, the Bronze and Narragansett turkeys.
Artificial insemination was not practical at the time. Domesticated turkey
hens with their wings clipped were released close to mating season into
ten-acre wire-fenced pens built in the Pennsylvania wilds. The wild toms
approached and entered the pens with the aid of ramps and openings in the
fence. (They could not be enticed to fly over the fence to the hens,
although they could easily have made the trip.) When the mating season
ended, the toms left the pens, and the hens made their well-camouflaged
nests throughout the ten acres and laid their eggs. Somehow, the wildlife
workers spied out enough nests in each pen to collect eggs for incubation,
hatching, and raising a new generation of partly wild turkeys. Years of
breeding successively wilder hens to wild toms produced an intelligent
untamable turkey that was genetically close to the native birds and could
survive in the wild.
Many years later, patience and hard work by wildlife managers in Vermont
produced a wild turkey that is very hardy for the extreme winter conditions
in Northern New England. The turkeys we watch on Bobolink Farm are their
descendants. We feel a deep appreciation of and emotional investment in the
visitations of these unique birds. We want the flocks to prosper. We may
have to enclose our garden in a wire cage and share our grapes with turkeys
as well as raccoons, but their presence invigorates the place. Perhaps in
time we may experience what William Bartram describes in his Travels,
when in northern Florida on a late eighteenth century spring morning he
awoke to “The cheering converse of the wild turkey cocks saluting each
other,...they begin at early dawn, and continue till sun-rise...The high
forests ring with the noise, like the crowing of the domestic cock, of these
social centinals [sic]; the watch-word being caught and repeated, from one
to another, for hundreds of miles around; insomuch that the whole country is
for an hour or more in a universal shout.”
Hmm… Well, perhaps prosper within limits, but what a way to start a spring
day!
