"operation wild turkey"

John James Audubon art.

​Just a few years into our adventure in our new location at the edge of the foothills, we bought a mature wild turkey from a neighbor who raised them in confinement.  There are three main types of wild turkey north of the Rio Grande differing mostly in the details of plumage, mostly limited to the feather tip banding.  The Eastern wild turkey has gorgeous rich deep chocolate brown tips, the Merriam's turkey of the interior west has ornate ivory tips, and the Rio Grande turkey's feather tips are an intermediate buff.  This first turkey of ours was a Rio Grande tom.   We named him "Normandale Furnace."

Turkeys are an odd creature aesthetically in that they are both homely and extremely handsome at the same time.  They shine like burnished metal in the sun while their heads look a bit like a burn victim through one lens while at the same all that naked warty dangliness sports its own deliciously saturated reds and blues and turquoises.  They are also one of the largest birds of flight on the planet, up there with the condors and the pelicans.

Alas, Mr. Furnace was not a flighted bird.  There is some conjecture that large birds of flight raised in confinement from an early age never develop the muscles to fly, and won't be able to develop them later, either.  I don't know if this is true of not.  I wonder if it simply didn't occur to Mr. Furnace to try.  And so the flight muscles remained atrophied from lack of use.  At any rate, he never did try and one night a fox had a go at him, leaving him alive but with a fair bit of his skin stripped off the flesh like an early Texan in the aftermath of a social event attended by the Comanche.   There was no recovery in the cards for Mr. Furnace and i killed him, reflecting on how so much brutality in nature arrives in the most exquisite of guises (foxes being amongst my favorite things) and on the most beautiful sun-shiny days and clear starlit eves.  None of this precludes mayhem, bloodshed, a partial skinning, .  

We got to thinking then, wouldn't it be super to have flocks of Mr. Furnaces' about raised semi-feral such that they could fly out the reach of predators?  And breed and raise their broods to do so, too.  A roving flock to enjoy in our our woods and chomp down on when the stomach dictated.  So we called up the late Dirt Willy, the guy you called in Alberta for all your wild turkey needs.  "Dirt, you got a two-four of Eastern wild turkey poults for sale?"  Yes I do.

We chose the Eastern turkey for the fact that Alberta already has flocks of Merriam's turkeys somewhat further to the south of us, and The State was not keen on folks letting privately owned stock of the same stripe out at large.  Also, we reckoned that the darker plumage would serve the birds better here inside the edge of foothills woods same as it did in woods of the east.  Raising the poults went off without a hitch.   Our big guardian dogs helped to keep them safe in the pre-flight weeks during which we locked them in at night when the phalanx of varmints from waiting foxes to grizzlies, unwarsed in shadows, were embolded to close ranks on the otherwise slumbering farmyard like a tribe of Lucifers.   They were very lively buggers and were only maybe one-sixth or even less adult size when they began testing their wings.  We rigged a selection of perches at varying heights and in defiance of the young turkey's reputation for being almost unbelievably stupid they grasped the intent immediately and were soon roosting on the higher perches some twelve feet off the ground.  

They grew and grew, roaming the farmyard not entirely tame of us yet very suspicious of carnivores and then we were fortunate to witness them, full sized now, on a most momentous evening.  Soft and perfect dusk.  As though by prior consensus they gathered just a few yards from the back door at a middling angle beneath the big leaved Balm o' Gilead trees on the west side of the house, with an eye to the high sturdy boughs.   A few of the females began to bob with wings cocked slightly open, calculating trajectory.  And then as if on cue several of them exploded upwards, followed by the huge young jakes.  They made it, and what a stirring, jubilant thing it was to witness!  Soon the rest of those remaining followed, all successful. 

So as you can see, it was all coming together like Walt Disney.  They consistently avoided predation and we looked forward to this rich new addition to our plans for our environs fully fruited.  I had visions of Eastern wild turkeys infesting the foothills forests in the same way i dream of a mix of bison and yak replacing all those imbecilic beeves it was not exactly heroic of us to have salted the lands with.   

Then it all came apart in the spring.  For whatever reason, the entire flock decided the best place to conduct their mating rituals was smack in the middle of the paved road off which our dead-end one extended.   They would make the trip on foot, a half mile, and then conduct their rituals in the centre of the asphalt.   Dancing and circling like Druids.  Pictures appeared in the local papers and stories began circulating of the toms attacking passing motorcyclists.  I became concerned for my own liability.  I imagined writing my memoirs from a tight cell behind close bars, "Wild Turkeys Ruined My Life."  

I called Dennis who raised wild turkeys in liberal confinement, similar to the way most Canadians are raised today.   He agreed to take them.  But first i had to catch them.  In the end, this was only partially successful, and a cadre of 'em ended up in the freezer.

Dennis raised them successfully for several years not far to the east of us, and then decided to try the same thing we had.  He actually had hens nesting in the woods.  But the foxes got all the eggs.  

There hasn't been a single successful introduction of turkeys into the wild using domestically-raised stock.  

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