Here in the valleys of western Oregon, wild turkeys are as ubiquitous as pigeons in cities. They were planted here for hunters, and like so many things (blackberries! Scotch Broom! Gorse! Kudzu!) they have found the climate amenable and the landscape is encrusted with them. I have so. Many. Turkey encounter stories: Turkeys in my school studio. Baby turkeys fished from water troughs. Turkeys on the porch. By the way, welding gloves provide great protection should you need to engage with a turkey.
One weekend I’d gone back to my office to work. After a couple hours, I heard muffled noise, like some kind of crowd having a scuffle. I went to investigate. Opening a door to the outside of the building, I was greeted with the source of the noise. Turkeys. Tom Turkeys. All in full tail-up, ruffled chest, strutting gobble mode, crowding the patio next to the building. It was a Tom Turkey convention, with gobble gobble gobbles echoing off the building. I stopped counting at 30. It was astonishing.
I kept my horses at my mother-in-laws small farm. A few summers ago, I noticed that the resident flock of turkeys would gather for a nap each afternoon. They’d flap up into the old oak trees, and snuggle in rows on the long, broad, drooping branches. I was always up there at the same time of day doing horse stuff. One day I noted a bluster of disturbance coming from the turkey nap tree. Didn’t think much about it, until I noticed it a couple days layer. And then the next day. Always right around 2:30, gobbles and flapping and scrambling noises.
I made a point to be in sight of the turkey trees the next afternoon. Sitting in the tall grass, I watched them wander in and flap up into the branches. Feathers fluffed, heads under wings. Gentle turkey snoring commenced. Ok, not that. About ten minutes later, a flash of movement out of the brush to the base of the tree. A bobcat! It sprang up onto a low hanging branch, grabbed a sleeping turkey, and leaped away! The turkeys simultaneously erupted in startled protest, then settled back in for naps. It’s almost like they thought they must have had a bad dream. Then later they’d notice that Gladys was nowhere to be found. And that clever bobcat kept visiting the turkey buffet for the next few weeks.
From Jess H., writing about wild turkeys in the Adirondacks:
Spring of my junior year of high school, I finally had both my driver's license and clearance from my parents to take the family car to points more distant than the mall closest to our suburban, upstate New York home. Forthwith, my best friend and I decided to go for a hike in the southern Adirondacks one weekend day. We identified a hike, drove to the trailhead, and set off. It was still early spring in the Adirondacks; it was sunny but cold, and the trees were naked. My friend and I were the only people on that trail right then. When we were about a mile in, we pissed off a wild turkey who, perhaps trusting more in its fight than its flight, charged us. I'm not proud to admit this, but we turned around and ran; we ran all the way back to the car, in fact, and drove to a diner.
Ok, full disclosure: I'm not entirely certain it was a wild turkey. We were, after all, facing the other direction (and running). But it WAS a dark, avian, flapping blob and if I had to describe the sound it was making I might well have said "like a gobble." Almost certainly a wild turkey.
At the beginning of the pandemic, way back in April, I went for a walk along the Riverway with my then-5-year-old son. When we returned to our car, parked in front of church on a side street, I found I'd locked my keys in. Someone walking by was kind enough to call AAA on their phone for me, and my son and I settled in to wait for the technician. We watched a wild turkey emerge from the church yard and cross the street, and as it wandered away from us, along the sidewalk, my son said, "Mommy, there are thirteen of them." I looked around and saw just two more. "Over there," he said, gesturing to the shadowed church wall. He was right, there were thirteen, and soon even more emerged. We counted them, amazed: "Fourteen! Sixteen!" They all came walking out of the yard toward the street where we stood and some approached us, picking up speed and following as we backed away from them. We were freaked out! Drawing on maternal instinct, I lunged toward them, and they ran the other way. We learned that when we moved away, they followed, but when we moved toward them, they ran, so we played this game with them for a while.
Eventually the turkeys wandered down the block, and we watched as they approached other passersby, and even an idling car, scattering people in opposite directions and preventing someone from getting out of the car. "Chase them," we called out, "They'll run away if you chase them!" One or two people tried it, but most were chased away themselves. Wild turkeys are aggressive, we concluded, but easily cowed, too. Finally, AAA came, our keys were retrieved, and we left the sixteen wild turkeys to pursue their adventures without us.
From Nicole P., writing about wild turkeys in West Virginia:
My first encounter with a wild turkey was when one swooped onto the greenhouse roof of the house next door. It was quite aggressively pecking at its reflection.
The next time I saw a rafter of wild turkeys was in 2013. I was on a holiday driving on a winding road above Keyser, WV. My sister, son and husband (his first time visiting my home state) were in our rented SUV. We were on our way to Jennings Randolph Lake and had just been startled by a line of windmills. I had always observed them from a distance but to drive up the hill and actually SEE one up close was both breath-taking and unnerving. As we passed by the whirling blades I slammed on the breaks as turkeys swarmed the road and surrounded our car. I had never seen so many and I don't know where they were hurrying off to, but they disappeared into the underbrush as rapidly as they had appeared. I continued down toward the town, unsure of what I would encounter next, being mindful of the deer grazing just off the edge of the road I noticed that somehow I had made it to the road up the hill from my cousin. Continuing on, we arrived at a previously unknown back way to my aunt's house. It was as if the turkeys had opened a wormhole that transported me from the outskirts to "downtown."
We once saw a turkey mama and her babies walking in our neighbor's backyard of our old house which was a bit of a crazy scene because we lived in the city! City turkeys! Who knew?
I have a turkey story. A few years ago I lived in Cape Cod, where there was a sizable wild turkey population. There was also a Main Street / downtown area, and the turkeys showed up all over town, including on the sidewalks and in the park areas of downtown. They looked like little deadpan businesspeople, sometimes literally walking up and down the sidewalk. One day there was an op-ed in the local paper, in which the writer described with sadness how children would frequently lunge at and scare the turkeys for fun, and she wished they wouldn't. At the time, it seemed both obvious and yet also radical to me. I want to say I never took pleasure in scaring birds or other animals but I'm sure I have.
Here in the valleys of western Oregon, wild turkeys are as ubiquitous as pigeons in cities. They were planted here for hunters, and like so many things (blackberries! Scotch Broom! Gorse! Kudzu!) they have found the climate amenable and the landscape is encrusted with them. I have so. Many. Turkey encounter stories: Turkeys in my school studio. Baby turkeys fished from water troughs. Turkeys on the porch. By the way, welding gloves provide great protection should you need to engage with a turkey.
One weekend I’d gone back to my office to work. After a couple hours, I heard muffled noise, like some kind of crowd having a scuffle. I went to investigate. Opening a door to the outside of the building, I was greeted with the source of the noise. Turkeys. Tom Turkeys. All in full tail-up, ruffled chest, strutting gobble mode, crowding the patio next to the building. It was a Tom Turkey convention, with gobble gobble gobbles echoing off the building. I stopped counting at 30. It was astonishing.
I kept my horses at my mother-in-laws small farm. A few summers ago, I noticed that the resident flock of turkeys would gather for a nap each afternoon. They’d flap up into the old oak trees, and snuggle in rows on the long, broad, drooping branches. I was always up there at the same time of day doing horse stuff. One day I noted a bluster of disturbance coming from the turkey nap tree. Didn’t think much about it, until I noticed it a couple days layer. And then the next day. Always right around 2:30, gobbles and flapping and scrambling noises.
I made a point to be in sight of the turkey trees the next afternoon. Sitting in the tall grass, I watched them wander in and flap up into the branches. Feathers fluffed, heads under wings. Gentle turkey snoring commenced. Ok, not that. About ten minutes later, a flash of movement out of the brush to the base of the tree. A bobcat! It sprang up onto a low hanging branch, grabbed a sleeping turkey, and leaped away! The turkeys simultaneously erupted in startled protest, then settled back in for naps. It’s almost like they thought they must have had a bad dream. Then later they’d notice that Gladys was nowhere to be found. And that clever bobcat kept visiting the turkey buffet for the next few weeks.
From Jess H., writing about wild turkeys in the Adirondacks:
Spring of my junior year of high school, I finally had both my driver's license and clearance from my parents to take the family car to points more distant than the mall closest to our suburban, upstate New York home. Forthwith, my best friend and I decided to go for a hike in the southern Adirondacks one weekend day. We identified a hike, drove to the trailhead, and set off. It was still early spring in the Adirondacks; it was sunny but cold, and the trees were naked. My friend and I were the only people on that trail right then. When we were about a mile in, we pissed off a wild turkey who, perhaps trusting more in its fight than its flight, charged us. I'm not proud to admit this, but we turned around and ran; we ran all the way back to the car, in fact, and drove to a diner.
Ok, full disclosure: I'm not entirely certain it was a wild turkey. We were, after all, facing the other direction (and running). But it WAS a dark, avian, flapping blob and if I had to describe the sound it was making I might well have said "like a gobble." Almost certainly a wild turkey.
From Sasha W. in Boston, MA:
At the beginning of the pandemic, way back in April, I went for a walk along the Riverway with my then-5-year-old son. When we returned to our car, parked in front of church on a side street, I found I'd locked my keys in. Someone walking by was kind enough to call AAA on their phone for me, and my son and I settled in to wait for the technician. We watched a wild turkey emerge from the church yard and cross the street, and as it wandered away from us, along the sidewalk, my son said, "Mommy, there are thirteen of them." I looked around and saw just two more. "Over there," he said, gesturing to the shadowed church wall. He was right, there were thirteen, and soon even more emerged. We counted them, amazed: "Fourteen! Sixteen!" They all came walking out of the yard toward the street where we stood and some approached us, picking up speed and following as we backed away from them. We were freaked out! Drawing on maternal instinct, I lunged toward them, and they ran the other way. We learned that when we moved away, they followed, but when we moved toward them, they ran, so we played this game with them for a while.
Eventually the turkeys wandered down the block, and we watched as they approached other passersby, and even an idling car, scattering people in opposite directions and preventing someone from getting out of the car. "Chase them," we called out, "They'll run away if you chase them!" One or two people tried it, but most were chased away themselves. Wild turkeys are aggressive, we concluded, but easily cowed, too. Finally, AAA came, our keys were retrieved, and we left the sixteen wild turkeys to pursue their adventures without us.
From Nicole P., writing about wild turkeys in West Virginia:
My first encounter with a wild turkey was when one swooped onto the greenhouse roof of the house next door. It was quite aggressively pecking at its reflection.
The next time I saw a rafter of wild turkeys was in 2013. I was on a holiday driving on a winding road above Keyser, WV. My sister, son and husband (his first time visiting my home state) were in our rented SUV. We were on our way to Jennings Randolph Lake and had just been startled by a line of windmills. I had always observed them from a distance but to drive up the hill and actually SEE one up close was both breath-taking and unnerving. As we passed by the whirling blades I slammed on the breaks as turkeys swarmed the road and surrounded our car. I had never seen so many and I don't know where they were hurrying off to, but they disappeared into the underbrush as rapidly as they had appeared. I continued down toward the town, unsure of what I would encounter next, being mindful of the deer grazing just off the edge of the road I noticed that somehow I had made it to the road up the hill from my cousin. Continuing on, we arrived at a previously unknown back way to my aunt's house. It was as if the turkeys had opened a wormhole that transported me from the outskirts to "downtown."
We once saw a turkey mama and her babies walking in our neighbor's backyard of our old house which was a bit of a crazy scene because we lived in the city! City turkeys! Who knew?
I have a turkey story. A few years ago I lived in Cape Cod, where there was a sizable wild turkey population. There was also a Main Street / downtown area, and the turkeys showed up all over town, including on the sidewalks and in the park areas of downtown. They looked like little deadpan businesspeople, sometimes literally walking up and down the sidewalk. One day there was an op-ed in the local paper, in which the writer described with sadness how children would frequently lunge at and scare the turkeys for fun, and she wished they wouldn't. At the time, it seemed both obvious and yet also radical to me. I want to say I never took pleasure in scaring birds or other animals but I'm sure I have.