Be Careful What You Wish For

there is entirely too much teestosterone in this picture. Hold your breath.

When pastel artist Cindy House moved from Vermont to the subtropical zone of southern New Hampshire, she wished she could get some wild turkeys in her yard. So Cindy started throwing out a bit of corn. It worked. Yesterday, Cindy had 70 turkeys in her yard.
Something tells me that turkeys weren't really meant to travel in flocks of 70. Cindy sent a hilarious video of the turkeys chasing crows that dared land too near their corn (cheap entertainment for a winter day). And this pair of young gobblers wound their necks together, and one bird's head ended up in the other's mouth. They struggled and fought for ten minutes until they finally got untangled. Gagg!
Maybe they'll consume each other, like mantises.

Cindy is fully aware that, while she complains about this mob of poultry, she could just stop feeding them at any time. Having fed a modest flock of 14 turkeys here on Indigo Hill, I understand and sympathize with Cindy's predicament. On one hand, you feel like a drone whose only purpose in life is to satisfy the flock's craving for corn. On the other, you get hooked on watching them, and you want to see what's going to happen next.

When she's not hauling around 50 lb. sacks of corn, Cindy paints landscapes with pastel. Cindy is a recovering bird artist. She did her time illustrating field guides (see her ducks and shorebirds in the National Geographic guide, and her exquisite warblers in Warblers by Jon Dunn and Kimball Garrett (part of Houghton Mifflin's Peterson series).
Now, Cindy paints places where she, and birds, like to be. For more of her ravishing work, see her web site.
Cindy says it totally ruins her Monday mornings to read my blog. Another of our mutual friends surmises that I must have the metabolism of a shrew. Aw, gee. See how nice my friends are? Cindy is perhaps the most self-deprecatory human being I have met outside Nebraska or North Dakota (two capitals of self-deprecation). She says that if she had a blog it would be more like a blip. Gagging, crow-chasing turkeys and stunning artwork notwithstanding, I presume. When I grow up I want to paint like Cindy.
I would like to lie down in Cindy's landscapes.