This is very thought provoking from David Crodrea,
As a side note, I have twelve feathered friends. I was feeding them this afternoon. There’s seven toms, four hens and one beardless baby jake. The four hens and baby jake stick together, I fed them earlier in the afternoon, and fed them later when I saw the seven toms, they all came to feed.
They come at a run, should’ve seen the four hens and one baby jake on Thanksgiving. They don’t run as fast as the toms, but they sure can run. The toms run really fast.
The birds are all in good shape. Two healed. One hen is a leper who got kicked around all last year. She’s still warted but healed they don’t kick her out, her warts are scared over, none open. She’s welcomed by them now. And another hen has a knot in her leg, 3″ or 4″ up from the foot. You can see she broke it, and she’s healed. If you watch closely you can see she’s got the faintest trace of a limp and that leg’s a hair shorter than the other. She’s not the first I’ve seen to heal from a broken leg, nor is the other the first leper I’ve seen who’s healed.
The hens are dainty little things. The toms are tough and over twice as big as the hens. The baby jake’s scared of his own shadow, but I’m working on him. The toms are the most outgoing, extremely social. The hens are of course dainty and shy, but they’re getting comfortable. The hens and baby jake have only been coming a couple months if that. The toms have been coming since last winter. They all come when called.
A number of times as I open the garage, one of the toms doesn’t like to wait as I fill a pail with bird seed. He’s walked in as much as seven or eight feet. He’s the first to ever come into the garage. I usually have to call him out like a dog, as he seems to know what’s in the big galvanized cans and is fixated on them and is slow to realize the pail in my hand has seed too.
They all have a pattern through out the block. They roost in some woods behind a house three houses up the street. Most like them. Some hate them. I don’t care, I’ll keep feeding, as they’re harmless things and it’s amusing to see the yuppies get their panties in a bind, you know the type who screech and holler “save the environment”, while driving electric cars which make heavy duty pickups seem “green”, and having their yards sprayed with Roundup AKA Agent Orange every other week. Those “bleeding hearts” are the ones who call the cops and demand they shoot them. The city contracts with federal pigs, gunmen from the Department Of Agriculture to come through every couple of years and rid the city of those feathered and fury menaces to society, (turkeys and white tails), all while voting for candidates who froth at the mouth at the very thought of a government monopoly on violence.
And yes, I know they’re federal pigs, gunmen from the Department Of Agriculture, as we had the misfortune to encounter one of the pigs a few years back and the two brothers, two toms we’d seen since they were jakes and were a blast to watch and feed suddenly disappeared two days after we encountered the pig.
FedEx called the cops on us over the two brothers. We know because the cop laughed his butt off when we answered the door and could barely tell us, he was laughing so hard. He laughed his way back to his squad fifteen minutes later, after we told him all about the feathered menaces to society. His last words before leaving had been, “have fun”. The two brothers got their kicks chasing delivery trucks and school buses up and down the block. They’d hover around the window of mail trucks stopping at mail boxes and they’d escort delivery men from their trucks to house’s front doors and back. Any harm? No. It’s impossible to put to words, but like with dogs, you can tell when it’s a happy bark and a angry or scared bark. Same for turkeys and their chatter. They’d chatter with happy excitement the whole time, when delivery trucks or buses were present. They were having a ball. But will anyone take time to learn as opposed to thinking they want to kill them? Many won’t. They never touched anyone. Just a pair of feathered dogs chasing trucks down a quiet suburban residential street. Oh the horror.
Last year a couple walked by as I was feeding the birds we had coming at the time. We talked. I told them about FedEx. The woman said “I guess they can bite” and her husband was wisely standing behind her when I replied, “They don’t have teeth”, he fought hard to smother his smirk and chuckle.
But that’s the truth, over the past decade, perhaps a little longer, I’ve fed many dozens, probably over a hundred turkeys. Sociable creatures, down right friendly, the way dogs are. They like to follow and hang out as you go about your chores and when they get tired of following they go off a short distance usually under a tree and bed down and watch you. No harm. No biting. They don’t even touch the garden. And the cooing they make is the most beautiful bird sound I’ve ever heard.
Do you know what scares turkey’s more than anything else? Beginning in late October, the squirrels with all their extra fat on for winter found a new source of entertainment, goosing the turkeys. They don’t even have to touch the turkeys, just lunge at them, or run between their legs or run under their tails, and a 25lbs tom is instantly 10′ above the ground. How quickly they can get off the ground is stunning. In all the years feeding turkeys this is the first we’ve seen squirrels goose them. All the squirrels, not just one or two do it.
So are turkeys a menace to society? Or have people become so impatient and unaware, they view friendly and harmless birds as threats that must be shot en masse, while screeching about how citizens must be disarmed?
I’ll keep feeding the turkeys and keep my guns and keep hunting and keep a smile on my face. And the willfully disarmed yuppies can keep crying.
Equip, train, pray and never disarm.
Update,
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