![\"20091115_Turkeys_0746](\"http:\/\/farm3.static.flickr.com\/2723\/4108066016_5ef8ba814c.jpg\" "\\"Two")
<\/a>Sunday Morning With Tom, Up In Here<\/p><\/div>\n
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You may not be able to tell from the photographic evidence, but Spouse and I had not one, not two, but something like thirty turkeys roaring around our backyard. Those of you who know your wild turkeys won’t have difficulty with that part of the proposition (you may even know that there are many accepted names for a group of turkeys, including “gang”, “posse”, “crop”, “dole” and “raffle”, or you might – like Spouse – just have the What Bird app<\/a> for your iPhone).\u00a0 You may, however, have some more difficulty with the following assertion:\u00a0 they were barking.\u00a0 And chasing each other around in circles.<\/p>\n I realize that the notion of barking turkeys may be somewhat controversial, particularly among those of you with an ornithological background.\u00a0 I am well aware of the prevailing wisdom to the effect that turkeys emit a sort of “gobble-gobble” noise, and I am not denying that some of the din arising outside our window was indeed of this variety.\u00a0 I think you can understand me, however, when I tell you that those noises were far less intriguing to me than the unmistakable barking also taking place.\u00a0 There are those who will refuse to believe it, despite my previous mostly unblemished record as a person who relates at least some of the truth not infrequently;\u00a0 these untrusting souls will say that I am spreading heresy of a sort.\u00a0 All I can tell you, gentle reader, is what I heard;\u00a0 I’m not here to pick any ideological battles, least of all with those inclined to amass specialized knowledge of so arcane a subject as the vocal habits of poultry. \u00a0 Perhaps the turkeys were rehearsing – poorly – for\u00a0 their performance of the woof-woof-woof version of Jingle Bells<\/em> at the upcoming turkey Christmas pageant (what a sombre affair I suppose that gathering would be, given the likely solemn associations most turkeys must have between this time of year and the premature demise of a loved one or two).\u00a0 Perhaps they were having a bit of a laugh and simply taking the piss out of a local dog that needed a good mocking.\u00a0 I am unable to express a truly informed opinion on the matter.<\/p>\n Let’s just agree, for the sake of moving on to the discussion below, that I do not know why <\/em>the turkeys were barking and leave it at that.\u00a0 Equally concerning was their physical behaviour:\u00a0 rocketing around in large circles and colliding with one another, they looked rather like NASCAR for domesticated fowl.\u00a0 It was a puzzling display, any way you slice it, and Spouse and I stared in first silent disbelief, shortly followed by full-throated laughter.<\/p>\n We resolved to deal with this extraordinary situation in the fashion of 21st-century man; by educating ourselves about our guests.\u00a0 Taking iPhones to hand, we quickly learned a few salient facts about our bizarre new visitors.\u00a0\u00a0 We learned, for example, that wild turkeys are native to North America<\/a> and that, as the largest ground-nesting bird indigenous to the continent, they were so beloved by the hungry, marauding and colonizing Europeans that they were actually taken from Mexico to Europe in the 1500s, domesticated and then brought back to the continent by settlers on the Atlantic coast<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 Meleagris gallopavo <\/em>was treated rather roughly, however, by the colonists:\u00a0 as the continent was civilized, it was also deforested and the turkeys’ reacted to this treatment of their habitat by dying in droves.\u00a0 Evidently, in many areas (such as Ontario, in 1909<\/a>) locally indigenous populations were wiped out entirely, leading many jurisdictions to import wild turkeys<\/a> from other places and to re-introduce them to the habitat in an effort to get them re-established.\u00a0 As recently as 1984, there were only 274 wild turkeys in all of Ontario<\/a>.\u00a0 Aggressive conservation and protection laws seem to have worked well for Wild Tom in Ontario:\u00a0 by some reports, there are more than 100,000 of them now<\/a> (many of them in my backyard, apparently). \u00a0\u00a0 Omnivorous eaters<\/a> (occasionally dining on snakes and frogs), wild turkeys can fly<\/a> quite well\u00a0 (yes, I know, I’ve seen that episode of WKRP in Cincinnati<\/a> too, but these are wild<\/em> turkeys we’re talking about;\u00a0 really, you must pay more careful attention) and like to roost in trees<\/a> at night.<\/p>\n Also, I learned that\u00a0 there is a National Wild Turkey Federation<\/a> – apparently.\u00a0 I was, however, confounded to find no mention whatsoever of barking turkeys in the serious literature available on the Internet.\u00a0 This lacuna in the otherwise estimable record of the Internet at knowing everything, taken alone, would have been a disappointment for me.\u00a0 Adding insult to injury, however, the only reference to barking turkeys that I located via Google was this distressing foray into fiction via the troubling sub-genre of poultry porn by Alexandra OneLight<\/a> (actually, I don’t know whether the article is or is not pornographic – when I saw some passages near the beginning about the mating habits of wild turkeys, I simply assumed the worst).<\/p>\n
![\"20091115_Turkeys_0751\"](\"http:\/\/farm3.static.flickr.com\/2658\/4108075884_bf1e4e388f.jpg\" "\\"A")
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