Turkey Talk

Turkeys are much more stupid than I thought.

I mean, I guess I never really thought turkeys were that smart, but still.

We have about 20 to 25 turkeys that we’re raising here in preparation for Thanksgiving turkey season. Everybody wants a nice, big ol’ organically raised turkey for the Thanksgiving dinner and we aim to give it to them. I asked Dom what Thanksgiving on the farm was like, and in his typical fashion he first responded with a mini-rant about the problematic nature of institutionalized, commercialized holidays. And then, in his typical fashion, he answered the question fairly and calmly, talking about how hectic it is getting everybody else their turkeys and so on, that there’s no time for a proper Thanksgiving. But a couple days later he’ll throw together a big meal. Of course, as I’m learning, almost every meal here on the farm is a big meal. We’re making chocolate zucchini bread soon, because we harvested several 6 pound zucchinis. I digress.

We keep the turkeys in tractor cages that we move every day so they have fresh grass. We keep them in there at night to protect them from predators, like the fishercats that ate almost all the ducks. But during the day, we let the turkeys roam free. When we let them out of their tractors in the morning they all stretch their wings and run up the hill flapping. I think about the flight of the Valkyrie. Or putting them in slow motion and parodying a football team running out of their tunnel.

Anyway, the pasture their tractor is in isn’t secured, so they wander all over the farm during the day, and besides recently getting into some herbs, they normally don’t cause a fuss.

But man, they do have a penchant to meander into a place, any place, and have no clue how to get back out. They are completely incapable of understanding what a corner is, or, really more importantly, what a fence is. I learned about birds that stash their food and are able to represent notions of the temporal and spatial dislocation, but turkeys must be on the opposite side of the phylogenetic tree from those birds. They’re like those monsters in Chip’s Challenge that always hone directly to your exact location, with no ability to move around a barrier.

I was walking past the chicken garden this afternoon, when I heard some distressed gobbling. Yup. The gate to the garden had been left open (or more likely had creaked open – the gate has no latch and needs to be repaired), and one solitary turkey had been stranded, left behind by the rest of the herd, none of which are intelligent enough to notice. This turkey was running back and forth, trying desperately to get through the chicken wire fence to rejoin his friends. Retreading the same 3 feet back and forth back and forth completely unable to realize that the gate it had just walked through was a mere 4 feet to its right. I circled around and herded it out the gate, allowing it to frantically scramble back to his compatriots.

Well done, turkey. Keep up the good work.