Turkey Days II

Yesterday I left you hanging. Well, at least those of you who didn't immediately scramble around, chimplike, to find the answer. Why should the base of the beard of a turkey gobbler be richly supplied with nerve endings?Ooh, I love this picture, a perfect bronze gobbler bathed in afternoon light right by our mailbox!

The answer lies in the mating behavior of wild turkeys. When the gobbler is excited, he’s puffed up to three times his normal apparent volume, every feather on end until he’s practically spherical. Like anyone who’s climbed on the scale with a bit (or a lot) of a pot belly, it can be hard to see what lies below; you either have to suck that belly in or crane your neck. In mating, the hen turkey lies flat on the ground, her head sticking straight up, wings out to the side. The tom climbs aboard and treads her shoulders with his feet. As it happens, his beard brushes the top of her head. (We've seen this twice in our own backyard!) Maybe that’s nice for the hen, but it’s essential for the tom. Because he can’t see over his own massive bulk, it’s how he can tell he’s in the right position to mate successfully. He keeps his beard in contact with her head throughout the treading and copulation. And so the beard seems to have a function besides the decorative, and those nerve endings make all kinds of sense in light of their behavior and the mechanics of copulation.

When the Warrens tell me some bit of natural history lore, I listen, because they’ve gained their knowledge through direct experience with wild things. When I tell them something, they listen right back. It’s good.
Jay lowers the turkey back into the cistern, a natural refrigerator.
I know that there are many who will look at these pictures and be repulsed by the sight of a wild turkey, sprawled out, turned into food. But the more I think about how and what most of us carnivores eat, the more sense it makes to me to walk out on your own land and with a couple of shots, fell a bird that will feed you for several days. Surely it is more in harmony with nature than eating a steak from a cow that was fed grain—a diet that doesn’t agree with it, a diet that makes it gassy and bloated-- in a Montana stockyard, slaughtered and trucked halfway across the country. I felt only a twinge of sadness on seeing the bird, knowing that there are a lot of turkeys around, knowing that it only takes one dominant gobbler to father many broods of poults, knowing a little about their impact on the understory vegetation and on the vanishing ruffed grouse in our area.I have to tell you, the best book on wild turkeys I have ever read, or ever expect to read, is Illumination in the Flatwoods: A Season with the Wild Turkey by Florida naturalist/artist Joe Hutto. He raised a brood of 14 from a clutch of orphaned, pipping eggs and walked with them in the woods to learn their ways and protect them, and return them gently to the wild. If you read nothing else, You Must Read This.

After the turkey viewing, we sat on the hill, enjoying the warm sun and soft breeze. Chet Baker cried until I let him out of the car and he went from Jay to Jeff and back again, meeting and greeting, snuffling, leaping and licking. They worried that he’d run away; I knew he wouldn’t. For a Boston terrier, home is where the heart is, where the people are. They’re such happy little dogs, so loving and sociable. The Warrens are nuts about him. Jay always sings "My Funny Valentine" to him.

Funny Valentine he is. His mouth is a little weak. But his figure is completely Greek.

When he’d get off on the trail of a rabbit or vole and begin to stray, a quiet, “Hyah, Bake!” would turn him on a dime and bring him smiling back to us.
I always dreamed of having a dog like that, a dog who listens, a dog who cares. A dog who responds not to shouted commands but to normal quiet tones; to English words and whole- sentence suggestions. It’s a two-way dance. To have a quiet dog like that, you must be quiet yourself. To have a dog who comes back at a word, you must first let him off the lead.
so take the darn thing off already. Ah, but Bake, there are cattle in the pasture below. Sometimes a word is not enough.

I don't know how a discussion of turkey beards turned into a Baker fix. It's been awhile, and he's just such a good doggeh. I thought you wouldn't mind.

Tomorrow morning bright and early, the rest of us head to Fayetteville, WV, to join Bill of the Birds in entertaining the happy festivalgoers to the New River Birding and Nature Festival who want to see Swainson's warblers, golden, cerulean and blue-winged warblers, and a plethora of other fabulous Neotropical migrants. I'll be speaking at Opossum Creek Resort Thursday night, a talk on the biology and natural history of migrant warblers. Bill and I, along with our fabulous faithful bassist Clay, play music for the Friday night gathering, and we're leading field trips Friday and Saturday mornings. It's festival time. But I'm happy because we'll all be together, even that good lil' doggeh, the Mayor of Opossum Creek. He will not be on the lead. He will be going cabin to cabin, meeting and greeting, bumming hamburgers.

Turkey Days

When we go out on these balmy soft spring mornings, it’s not long before the air is shattered by the explosive gobble of a wild turkey. Something about this call makes me laugh; it’s more like a sneezing fit than a song. Turkeys are doing well around here, despite coyotes and great horned owls, raccoons, opossums and free-roaming cats. They’re doing so well that wherever they appear, ruffed grouse seem to vanish. I’ve seen the changeover on our own land. Granted, I may not have the whole story; other factors such as a maturing forest could have more to do with grouse disappearance than does competition with turkeys. But if you think about it, turkeys and grouse eat essentially the same thing, but turkeys have a much higher reach for buds and seeds than do grouse. I don’t know. It’s a theory, like almost everything else in natural history.

I’d rather feed turkeys than hunt them; I’d rather watch them court than call them in to shoot them. I do have a certain admiration for anyone who can get close enough to a turkey in the woods to shoot it, though, because as a deer hunting friend once said, “Deer are deaf, dumb and blind compared to turkey.” Turkeys don’t miss much.
You have to go out before dawn and camo up and be still, and you have to be good with calls.

I was checking bluebird boxes along a country road near our house when I saw my pals, the Warren boys, in a red pickup ahead. Like turkeys, the Warren boys don’t miss much. They recognized my car in the their rear view mirror, pulled over and got out. Jeff pulled out his crow call and cawed to me. I cawed back. That’s how we make contact in Whipple. They were dressed in camouflage and grinning ear to ear. “Got a 20-pounder this morning,” Jeff drawled. “Ooh, can I see it?” I always like to see wild things up close, even if they’re dead.

“We put him in the cistern to keep him cool.” So we drove up to the barn and the Warren boys grunted a big slab of sandstone to the side, uncovering a magnificent shallow cistern half-full of water. Dangling just over the surface was the turkey, relieved of his innards. There was something spooky, mysterious and ooky, about the giant bird slowly twirling over the cold murky water.
They hauled him up and laid him on the grass for me to admire. Jeff showed me his short, straight spurs, suggesting that he was in his second spring. I showed the Warrens the brown vermiculation on his tertials, suggesting the same thing to me. We traded bits of information.

“Ever feel the beard?” Jay asked, and I was intrigued to find it just as stiff and tough as horsehair, stronger even, perhaps. The feathers are without barbules, black and wiry. Now it was my turn to tell them something. “Recent research suggests that the beard isn’t just decoration. It may be a sensory organ that helps the tom mate.”
Apparently, on dissection, ornithologists discovered that the bony pedicel, or base, of the beard was richly enervated. Now, why would a decorative bunch of bristles need a lot of nerve endings? I will tell you tomorrow. Tee hee hee.