The Turkey (and Happy Thanksgiving)

More than ten years ago, I had just gotten chickens and had fallen madly in love with them. My son, just five years old at the time, was taking his first ever theater class for little kids. Everyone was guaranteed a part, and my son was a puppy in a production of Disney’s 101 Dalmatians.

One day, when we arrived at practice, I saw a Subaru in the parking lot with a personalized license plate–CHKNLADY. I have to meet that woman, I thought to myself. That evening, while sitting in the parent waiting room, I overheard a woman talking about her chickens and turkeys, so I had to ask if she was CHKNLADY. She was!

She was wonderful, and we had a lovely conversation about chickens that evening. She warned me though.

“Don’t ever get turkeys,” she said.

I asked her why, and she explained, “Let me put it this way. We got eight turkeys to raise for food. We planned to keep four for ourselves and then share the others with friends and family for the Thanksgiving holiday. We had no turkey at Thanksgiving, and instead, we have now eight turkeys that play soccer with my kids.”

Ten years later, I remembered that story but thought I was a hardened homesteader that had lost some of my sentimentality about raising animals for food. After all, I helped process many meat chickens and had come to accept it as a better way to eat meat. I thought we could be different than the CHKNLADY.

Our plan was to keep a small flock of one tom, four or five hens, and then raise turkeys for food, processing the toms as needed to feed our family and our Great Pyrenees. I have been paying about $125 every Thanksgiving for an organic, humanely-raised turkey. I thought we could surely do this ourselves.

What I have come to learn about turkeys has changed my life. Just as chickens changed my life when I got them more than ten years ago, the turkeys have had a profound impact on me. Not all of it is good because they can be exhausting. In comparison with chickens, they are difficult birds, but oh my gosh, they are magnificent! They hook you in, and you will do their bidding. Ron is their servant, and I am their assistant servant.

Since today is Thanksgiving, and our turkey named Thanksgiving is running around the yard, I thought I would write about what I have learned from these amazing creatures. I hope it doesn’t ruin your Thanksgiving. I am not against eating turkey. In fact, our hope is to hatch a few birds next year and work hard to ensure they do not imprint on us and then have a turkey next Thanksgiving.

Still, after getting to know these birds, I am definitely against the cheap birds in the grocery store because I know what kind of life they lived. If you can bear it today, please read what I have learned and make a plan to buy a humanely-raised turkey next year if you can. It will not be cheap, but if you can do it, it will be worth it.

Turkeys are majestic animals. There is a reason that Benjamin Franklin wrote they were “noble” and a “bird of courage” and a “true original native” of America.

And here are some things I have learned about them this year…

1. Turkeys imprint deeply.

It is difficult to care for baby turkeys. When they first hatch, if they do not have a mother, you have to teach them how to eat and drink–over and over. With baby chickens, you show them one time, and they are all set. It took me two to three days of constant feeding to get them where they could eat on their own. During that time, we bonded, and those babies imprinted on me. The bond just grew over the weeks because they demanded a lot of attention.

After about a month, I could no longer handle eight demanding little turkeys by myself, so Ron stepped in. They bonded so deeply with him too. These turkeys are difficult (see more thoughts below), but they love us, think we hung the moon, and are so sweet to us. This deep bond makes other aspects of raising turkeys more challenging, but I am in awe of the biology of it. It is a reminder of the bonds humans share with animals.

One way I know the bond is deep is that I can break up fights between the boys. I can get right down in the middle of these giant birds, little dinosaurs, just throwing down because the toms will seriously fight, and they will not hurt me. You can see they will be so angry at each other, but mama is sacred. No one hurts mama. This is the same for Ron. They love us so much.

*As an aside, we had three males and now have two. We had one male who was starting the trouble most frequently, and it was a devastating decision to make, but he left us no choice. Ron processed him last week, and the fighting has stopped. I will have to tell that story later. Maybe. It’s a hard one.

2. Turkeys are extremely social.

The turkeys do not just love us. They also have a love-hate relationship with each other. I think it’s more love, but they are very much like toddlers right now at just about eight months old. They have to be together though. If one of them gets separated, they will cry and cry until we go help them find their people. And they miss us terribly if we have to be away from the house during the day.

When we get home, they run up to us and click and chirp and the boys strut and show off. I tell the boys, “Oh, you are such a pretty boy,” and they immediately start putting on a show. They have done this since they were just tiny little babies strutting around in miniature.

3. Turkeys are extremely, extremely vocal but also communicate with color.

I’ll start with the vocal. I have never seen such vocal creatures. They talk constantly! And they have so many different ways of speaking. They are quick to let you know they are unhappy via their cries, but they click constantly to keep in contact with each other and have coos for talking sweet and a kind of curious coo when they see something in the sky, sometimes things I cannot see. And, of course, they gobble. The gobble is usually some kind of “out of sorts” expression. The first time they got in trouble from me was for picking on the ducks. I ran outside and grumped at all of them, and they just gobbled and gobbled about it.

But they also bark, like a dog that is a turkey. When someone comes to our house, they bark. If it’s someone they don’t know and that someone comes into our driveway, there will be braking plus gobbling. If the delivery people have to tell me something, I cannot hear a word they are saying. We have to stand in the driveway and yell over the turkeys. I always apologize.

The cutest thing is that they bark at the fence when people walk by, just like our Pyrenees. I do not know if this is usual or if this is behavior our turkeys learned from the dogs, but when someone is out on our country road for a walk, they will now not only be barked out by two Great Pyrenees, but a small flock of turkeys will bark and gobble at them. It’s so cute to see two dogs and then a row of turkeys lined up at the fence griping at our poor neighbors, who seem bemused but it all.

Interestingly, turkeys also communicate with the color of their heads. They change their head colors with their moods, much like octopuses, I suppose. They have three head colors–red, white, and blue–but there are a variety of shades in between that give you insights into what is going on in their little minds–and there is so much going on. The red means upset or excited, and the blues and whites are calmer. When we pet them, they turn blue and white. When they get dried cranberries in the mornings (they LOVE these), their heads are a combination of blue and red.

I am fascinated by all of it.

4. Turkeys are highly emotional creatures.

I had always heard and people continue to tell me that turkeys are mean. I can’t exactly disagree with this, but I also can’t agree with it either.

A few weeks ago, I was talking to our new doctor, who grew up on a farm, about our turkeys. He said he didn’t like turkeys because they are mean. I tilted my head and asked, “Are they though?” It was a question for myself as well because I can’t decide. The doctor looked at me with a look that said, “Yes, they are!”

I thought about that all day and evening, and the next morning, I saw the female turkeys chasing our blind duck, Anna Maria, doing their best to peck her on the head.

“Well, I guess they are mean,” I thought to myself.

I also thought back to the way the boys would sometimes gang up on Boudica and be mean to her. She is so deeply trained to care for the livestock that she just takes their abuse, but it breaks my heart.

However, in both of these cases, the turkeys have reasons for being “mean,” at least according to them. They are the most emotional creatures I have ever seen. They wear it all just right there for the world to see. There is no wall, no filter. If they feel something, they express it with vigor, like way too much vigor.

In Anna Maria’s case, I have seen her accidentally bump into the turkeys, as she is blind, and this offends the turkeys. I think it has taken them a bit to figure out she’s not meaning to confront them. And, in Boudica’s case, I think they get tired of her barking. In fact, Ron has said he’s certain of this.

I still side with Anna Maria and Boudica every time because, in my opinion, the turkeys are unreasonable, but I can see they don’t really mean to be. They are just really deep feelers who live honestly in their emotions.

I remember the first time I saw this in action. The turkeys were pretty young, just a couple months old, and I saw several of them sitting in a line on top of the duck house. I was just sitting out there chatting with them, when one of the boys pecked one of the girls on the head. The one he pecked is maybe the most intelligent of the five girls we have, and her face reveals a lot. I saw a look in her eye after she got pecked on the head, and I knew there was going to be trouble.

She was deeply offended and quite pissed. She tore into that boy like I couldn’t believe. She had his snood stretched out a mile. I went over to break it up and just couldn’t. I finally got the boy out of harm’s way, and that girl started attacking everyone else. She was not letting this go.

So I ended up having to pick her up and carry her around for about ten minutes. I could see she had calmed down, so I sat her down and hoped for the best. I am not kidding. She made a line for that boy and started attacking him again! It took me forever to calm her down, and I began to learn that turkeys are highly emotional creatures. They love big, and they fight big. And they are easily offended.

5. Turkeys are amazingly intelligent.

I think part of the reason turkeys are so easily offended is that they are highly intelligent. I have learned from the chickens and ducks and the most intelligent among them are almost always the most difficult to manage on a farm because they have opinions, and sometimes, those opinions are strong, and sometimes, those opinions differ from mine.

These animals are profoundly intelligent. They learn things quickly. They have amazing spatial awareness and understand either our language or tone of voice very, very well. When they get reprimanded, which is never more than us telling them “no” they can’t do something they want to do, such as eat from the bird feeders or be mean to the ducks, they cry and act sad and try to make up, especially to Ron. They desperately want to be in his good graces.

The best way I can describe these turkeys is that they are very similar to three year olds. They are smart enough to be terrors, are extremely self-centered, but are also so brilliant they are charming and interesting and really just absolutely fascinating creatures.

***

Truly, I feel like that just a fraction of what I could write about these amazing animals, who, somehow, are ugly in a way but, at the same time, breathtakingly beautiful. Maybe it’s their contradictions, so human like, that make me love them so.

One day, I will try to write more. I feel like I could write a 20 page essay on them, but who would want to read that? I hope this Thanksgiving ramble on the turkey was just right length. I hope you found it interesting and learned some things about turkeys.

And I hope you had a happy Thanksgiving.