Turkeys might survive us all
“They eat everything: worms, hot dogs, sushi, your breakfast, grubs. They are fairly flightless and eerily fearless, three-foot-tall feathered dinosaurs,” writes Jill Lepore in The New Yorker. Once nearly extinct in New England, turkeys are now back (with a vengeance?) and “brunching at Boston’s Prudential Center, dining on Boston Common, and foraging alongside the Swan Boats,” Lepore adds:
“Don’t feed the turkeys,” one city office warns civilians, of the non-hunting sort. They may attack small children. (Small children’s approach, however, may prove difficult to deter.) “Don’t let turkeys intimidate you.” To daunt them, the henpecked advise, wield a broom or a garden hose, or get a dog. You sometimes see people standing their ground, a man chasing a squawking flock off his front porch, waving his arms. “Tired of the turkey shit on my steps,” he snaps. A bicycle cop veers into a hen, on purpose, a near-miss, urging her away from a playground: “Scram, bird, scram!” And still the turkeys gain ground: the people of New England appear indifferent to the advice of the Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, recalling childhood afternoons spent in schoolrooms, placing a hand on construction paper and tracing the outline of splayed and stubby fingers to draw a tom, its tail feathers spread wide. A turkey seemed, then, an imaginary, mythical animal—a dragon, a unicorn. And here it is! Roosting in the dogwood tree outside your window, pecking at the subway grate, twisting its ruddy red neck and looking straight at you, like a long-lost dodo. What more might return in full force? Will you ever see a moose in Massachusetts? A great egret in Connecticut?
Birds in general are not faring well in North America. It’s “an avian apocalypse.” But turkeys have adapted.
Most days, I pass a group of five big ones on my daily walk. They wander down the mountainside, cut across the Grove Park Inn golf course, hop up a wall, and stroll into the manicured yards on a well-traveled thoroughfare. Yesterday, one grazed casually beside the 1st Tee as golfers teed up. Neither human nor bird took notice of one another.
Whole families (a dozen or more) wander through my neighborhood, coming from where and headed where, I don’t know.
And bears. There are dens in the draw behind and above and below my late MIL’s house. A neighbor once remarked she could hear cubs in the den below suckling at night from her deck.
So far, turkey seem nonplussed by the skyrocketing real estate prices that are forcing working people out of town. So too in Boston. The only force that will stop birds or bears will be annoyed second- and third-home owners demanding the city do something. Perhaps they can hire the coyotes so long as they ban them from using ACME products on their nightly hunts.