The great Turkey Mystery

I got an email from a friend in Colorado w/ the subject saying "A friend needs a ride to Safeway". I ignored it for awhile, thinking I was just on her mailing list and she was literally trying to get someone a ride into town. When I'm in Colorado I'm staying WAY up in the mountains and it wouldn't be surprising for people to buddy up for going into town. It's not trivial.

But no. It wasn't that. It was that the TURKEY IS BACK!

If you were reading the very early blogs you might remember that when I was in Colorado last summer, we were on our way to the airport for me to go back to California when we were stopped on the road by the spectacle of a wild turkey sitting in the road, panting, while a line of cars were stopped because they couldn't get past it. Then, there was also a guy in a pickup truck striding around w/ a big gun in a holster on his hip. We never did figure out if he was going to try to kill and eat it, but that's illegal to hunt from the road w/ a handgun.

So we stopped, of course, even though we could have passed since the turkey was on the other side of the road. We all agreed that an animal in trouble was more important than getting to my plane.

I went up to the turkey and he didn't move. His eyes looked glazed and he was panting, and he apparently could not stand up. So I grabbed some jeans out of my suitcase and put my arms into them to act as protection for my arms and hands, and I leaned over the bird and felt underneath for the legs, held them, and put my arms around the limp turkey and lifted him up and carried him to the car, got in, put a cloth over his eyes, and we started down the road. Richard called and called all kinds of rehab centers, wildlife people, humane society, ASPCA EVERYONE! They all either had answering machines (and none of them ever did answer our messages!) or they'd say, "A wild turkey? That's poultry. We don't do poultry.,"

Poultry? It's a wild animal in need! Geez, who knew that in Colorado you don't help an animal if it's edible. SHEESH!

The turkey was very weak and panting so we figured we'd have to put it on a large box and take it home and put it in a dark, warm, safe place. I figured I'd have to rig up something to be able to hydrate the turkey if he wouldn't drink. So we went to Safeway to try to find a large box.

Richard came back w/ the biggest box they could find, which wasn't nearly large enough, but I got out of the SUV w/ the turkey and tried to set him in the box.

Suddenly he became all power and pazzaz and shoved out of my arms and ran like a roadrunner across the parking lot. Huh?

I've never seen an "injured" bird recover so quickly in my LIFE!

I tried to corner him and take him back to the car but then he flew effortlessly to the top of the Safeway and eyed me with complete distain and disgust. Luckily, the Safeway was w/in flapping distance of the wilderness from which we'd just come and he made his way back toward the wilderness.

We were flummoxed.

Why had this turkey been hanging around on the road as if injured, not moving when people came right up to himj, but suddenly he reverted to being a wild thing once we left the area?

The only theory we could come up with was that he had figured out that going out on the road was a way to avoid predators. There must have been something in those bushes that was more frightening to him than the people. If he had been someone's pet, then why was he SOOO stressed and why did he run from me as soon as he could? Why did he allow me to handle him without a struggle in the first location?

If there had been a fox or other predator in the bushes (we see foxes all the time there), then it would have been a great strategy. The guy w/ the gun said the turkey had been hanging around the road for 3 days.

Had someonoe dumped him off?

Unbelievably, I still made my flight!

We thought the saga of the mystery turkey was over with. Until last week when he (or another turkey) showed up in the SAME PLACE, miles away from town, on the SAME ROAD! how can this be? And he's hanging around the road again!

What is going on here?

I would LOVE to hear theories from others about this, especially people who know something about turkeys. Do they have the intelligence to come up w/ a survival strategy like this? I think wild turkeys are MUCH more intelligent than domestic turkeys. There's a book called ILLUMINATION IN THE FLATWOOD that's a great study of wild turkeys and they seem to be pretty complex animals.

Comments anyone?

--Stacey