Ornithological Threats to My Sanity

You would think that an intelligent, college-educated woman (such as myself) would have the ability to outwit a creature with a brain the size of a paperclip. You would think, but you would be wrong. Turkeys have a false reputation for being stupid. They are not. Trust me on this one. I wish they would stick to learning to fly, which they are unbelievably bad at for a bird. Instead they have insisted on thinking up new ways to drive me to a level of idiocy beyond comprehension.

I had no idea that I had opened myself up to turkey mania when we gave the dog to my parents early one summer. I have to defend that choice. She was getting old and needed far more attention than we could give her in our busy household full of growing children. The dog joined our household when we moved to our home on forty acres of remote forest. The neighbors insisted we needed a dog and perhaps they were right since she kept the turkeys away from the house during her tenure. Once she left, the turkeys appeared at the back door in evening gowns and tuxedoes whistling “Home On the Range.”

At first, I thought the turkeys were cute and quaint and oh so country. They wandered through the yard, picking off small insects with their wrinkled beaks and booping that inane turkey boop with which they punctuate their gobbles. The males would occasionally show off their feathers to remind the females how conceited they were. “Look,” I called to the children, “the turkeys are in the yard. How sweet.”

I swiftly changed my tune when I discovered how much damage wild turkeys can do to a garden. Those turkeys dug up anything and everything I planted in boxes, pots, or barrels in my yard or on my deck. They dug looking for bugs to eat. They dug to make a place to sit for a few minutes. They dug to get purchase to climb the posts leading up to the grape arbor. They dug just to see me turn purple in the doorway. Atop the grape arbor, they bashed around on their clunky feet, with their large turkey bodies, and trashed the arbor. Slats broke and fell under their weight. They ate most of the grapes before the fruit became ripe enough for us to enjoy it. They pooped on the deck, picnic tables, chairs, benches, grill, and my gardening sneakers. Not delicate little goldfinch poo but honking big turkey poo.

This meant war.

At first I thought perhaps I had simply made them too comfortable and that if I chased them off whenever they approached the house then they would get the message and go elsewhere. I work at home as a writer so I’m around during the day. Whenever I saw them in the yard I ran outside shouting and waving my arms. I work via phone with people all over the country. Picture me politely saying, “Excuse me for a moment” to one of my clients, putting my headset on mute, and streaking out the door screaming and tearing at my hair. Afterward I would return to the phone, sit back down calmly, catch my breath, and resume my conversation.

Unfortunately, they got used to my hollering and gesticulations very quickly and pretty soon they didn’t budge when they saw me, no matter how much noise I made or how bad my hair looked. I jumped up and down. I clapped my hands. They booped. I tried throwing rocks, but I’m as athletic as a radish and could neither aim nor get any distance with a throw. I was forced to physically chase them all over the yard while hollering and clapping my hands. In big boots.

I enlisted my son to blast his trumpet, which worked surprisingly well. The turkeys hated that trumpet. They squawked and fled when he blew it. Soon he only had to show it to them and they’d run away. But he had to go to school and play sports and take trumpet lessons so he couldn’t stick around all day chasing the turkeys off.

Then I thought perhaps if I played a radio on the deck it would keep them away. I put a boom box on the picnic table and played loud jazz. It seemed to be working at first. But within a few days, the turkeys strutted down the deck booping a scat. So I turned it to talk radio. That kept them off for a week or more, until they got used to that too and knocked on the kitchen door booping to be let in to use the phone to call the radio station with their opinion. Just as well. Listening to the radio in the background all day long had given me an eye twitch.

As Halloween approached, I noticed scarecrows in the pumpkin patch where we went for our jack-‘o-lantern pumpkins. Aha! A scarecrow! That’s the ticket. I made not one, but three. I stuffed newspapers into old jeans and my husband’s old plaid flannel shirts. I blew up balloons and put Halloween masks on them and jammed them on top for heads. They looked creepy, but failed to deter the turkeys, who kicked the scarecrow heads off and played soccer with them.

At Thanksgiving, with the smell of a 22-pound turkey roasting in our oven, I thought I might get at least a one-day reprieve. Wouldn’t you think that the smell of one of their brethren cooking would put them off? No such luck. (Can birds smell?) Flocks of these beasts, as many as 30 at a time, strolled through the yard. I guess they didn’t get the memo about it being a national holiday. Perhaps they were protesting the part about the turkey in every pot.

A relatively seasonal gardener, I don’t grow much during the winter months. With my garden dormant, I took a much-needed break from my turkey battles for the winter. By spring, the turkeys had bent our deer fence so low hopping onto it and over that the deer were leaping into our yard in droves. If you know anything about country living, you will know that nothing destroys a yard or garden faster than deer. Deer are not picky eaters. In our neighborhood they ate anything with moisture in it. And the deer apparently notified the rabbits that there was good eatin’ at our yard. The few things deer detest, such as fragrant oregano or mint, the rabbits adore. The turkeys remained indifferent to the deer and rabbits for whom they had blazed a path into our yard. They were after bugs (which required scratching up the ground) and grapes (which required thrashing around in our collapsing grape arbors) and random destruction (just to see that funny woman appear at the door and do that interesting dance while foaming at the mouth).

I did not have the energy to go into battle with the turkeys for another season. I laid my sword at their feet, threw in the towel, signed the treaty, gave up the ghost, capitulated as it were. When people asked me what I was growing in my garden that summer, I told them “turkey and deer buffet.” The turkeys had won.

There is only one way for this story to end. We moved.

Seriously, we did not move solely because of the turkeys. There were many reasons; although one of them was certainly the daunting task of reclaiming our little corner of the earth from nature on a daily basis. It finally wore us down. We got too old for these shenanigans. The persistence of the turkeys and the rapidity with which nature reasserts her authority and seizes untended places gives me pause. Perhaps it should terrify me. Not so. It comforts me that the natural world will continue on into the future long after humans have disappeared from the scene. We people think we are so important, so powerful, such higher beings. What makes us more deserving of a patch of earth than the turkeys? I hope that once humans have disappeared from the planet altogether, these magnificent winged creatures will take up residence as they choose and continue to fling their wild imprint on the pattern of existence.

Even if humans alter the ecosystems of the planet beyond repair, then other life will follow. The natural world will simply transform into something else and continue on an evolutionary path we can’t imagine. And who am I to say that the world without humans will not be as beautiful or touched with grace in its own way as the world with humans has been?

Boop on, turkeys, boop on.