Field Notes–

Turkey Love On The Trot

By Curtiss Clark

There is a cornfield at the corner of my road that you can read like a newspaper; it tells the story of the year in installments. It starts with the blank page of January laid out below black crow scribes, so pretentious with their portentous yawping, and it ends in the fullness of the harvest when the cornstalks bend and buckle with golden treasure.

For the past two months, the story has turned to romance with the male turkeys as the headliners. Every day, morning and night, indolent hens peck indifferently around their feet at insects and seed corn while toms take turns impersonating Tutankhamen, Louis XIV, and Liberace with extravagant poses, slow exaggerated strutting, and majestic furling and unfurling of their tail feather fans. It has to be disheartening for these posers. Despite all their exertions, it seems the gals only go gaga for grubs.

As stupid as this mating ritual looks to me, the toms are doing something right because in the coming weeks the hens will have a sizable entourage of poults. If I’m lucky, it will happen before this annual turkey soap opera disappears behind a curtain of corn. After that, I will only catch glimpses of them as they stop traffic to cross the road or conduct their occasional raid on the yard for fallen sunflower seed at the feeders. But they will stay in constant communication right through the fall, calling to Kate and me in the stillness of dawn and dusk through the open windows with their chattering hysterical gobbles, which can be heard a mile away. They fill the fields and the woods with the sound of foolishness, which is oddly reassuring at the beginning and end of these overly serious days.

Wild turkeys are no fools, however. That same stillness in the woods at the margins of the day is also pierced by the blood chilling ululations of coyotes on the prowl. As much as they would love a turkey dinner, the coyotes mostly settle for mice, moles, and the occasional unfortunate barn cat. The turkeys are long gone or safely roosting in trees by the time the coyotes pick up their scent. Despite all their goofiness, the birds have keen sight and hearing. And they are remarkably fast — or so I’ve read.

Wild turkeys have been clocked at 55 miles per hour on the wing, although I’ve never seen them fly more than 10 or 20 feet to claim a precarious perch on a fence rail or to clear the road when they can’t out-trot the traffic. (On foot, they can reach speeds up to 12 miles per hour.) No matter how they choose to travel, however, they have been making a rapid comeback in Connecticut.

In the early 19th Century, the wild turkey population in the state was completely wiped out by a series of severe winters, land clearing for agriculture, and by unrestricted hunting. Times have changed, though. With the decline of farming in Connecticut, most fields have returned to woodlands. So, in 1975, the state Department of Environmental Protection captured 22 wild turkeys in New York state and resettled them in northwestern Connecticut. Evidently, they liked their new home. Now, 30 years later, it is estimated that there are 35,000 of the birds statewide.

From what I’ve seen of the romantic inclinations of the turkeys in the corner cornfield, however, I would say that is a conservative estimate.