Jurassic Park At Eight In The Morning...

This morning at eight a.m. my husband woke me asking where I kept my digital camera. I found myself waking up to screeching screams coming from our backyard that were much like the background screams I remember hearing in the movie Jurassic Park!

I groggily went to where I keep my camera handing it to my husband, and looked out into our backyard where all the racket was coming from.

There on our new, red brick patio was a red and blue faced wild turkey walking around like it was a ‘natural’ thing for a wild turkey to do at eight a.m. in the morning.
All the while this bird was doing it’s ‘walk about’ it was screeching those ear piercing screeches that were not the typical gobble, gobble sound that everyone has heard domesticated turkeys do.

I feel confident that wild turkeys still do normal gobble, gobbles at normal times in their turkey lives because late yesterday afternoon I did do gobble gobbles myself, and I directed the gobbles at seven of these birds as they walked on the golf course in front of our back yard. All the hens turned to look to see where the gobble gobbles were coming from.

The larger bird of the group of seven, which had to be the lead male, came over to investigate and got a good look-see at me before he declared that I wasn’t a turkey like he was a turkey so he went back to his hens.
This morning I got the message that something seemed to be ‘different’.
Ahh, Paradise sometimes throws a curve!.

After our visiting turkey grew tired of walking around our patio it hopped up on our retaining wall, and then onto our lawn, which I am sure looked a lot like the golf course to turkey lurkie,
Thank God, birdie didn’t do a poop on either our lawn or our patio!

We watched as Ms. Turkey, we are sure it was a lady turkey, walked around on our still rather new backyard lawn and then proceeded to run, taking up speed, flapping it’s wings and taking flight landing on the red brick patio, and then used the momentum she had created to jump up onto our Spanish clay roof.
This bird, this wild turkey was walking around on our roof, and inside the house we could hear it all clearly because those tiles are hard tiles; all the while it continued to screech those ear piercing, Jurassic Park screams!

This wild turkey walked across our roof till it was on the other side, and then it jumped down into our front yard. We were both still inside our house as we scrambled across our rooms to one of our front windows that looks out on our front yard; the same yard where the cedar pine resides, the same cedar pine where the whole flock of turkeys flew out of sometime earlier in the year as witnessed by our neighbor Phyllis, who lives across the street.

The turkey that walked across our roof jumped down to our front yard, and was met by another turkey that had been walking about in our front yard already. They greeted each other with that same high pitched scream I heard from the one turkey when it was alone walking about and screaming it's head off in our backyard.

Now I know how wild turkeys locate each other when they become separated, and I know how they greet each other when they once again meet. I have to think that the Jurassic Park screams I heard this morning must be to a wild turkey what screams of 'help', or 'where are you' are to we humans when we become lost. The screeches of greeting I heard from the two turkeys when they met up again has to be like the human screams of delight we make to each other when we locate a loved one we though was separated from us, and we meet up again!

Both of the turkeys we watched and listened to this morning appeared to be hens because they were smaller than the ‘big bird’ that I met up with last evening, and they didn’t have the clump of feathers hanging off their chests as the large male did.

Yes, living in Paradise is interesting and sometimes disturbing. Like at eight a.m. when you wake up to the screams that you would swear came out of a scene in the movie Jurassic Park!

Gobble, Gobble, pass the cranberry sauce, please…, which do you prefer; a hen or a tom for Thanksgiving dinner?

Did I tell you that my husband went out the garage door, and tried to get a close up picture with my digital camera but the turkeys, once they got together, moved very fast on down the road, and he didn’t get a good, clear picture but there is always the next time.
Meanwhile I will leave my digital camera where it is easily accessible so the next time we will be able to get to it sooner, and hopefully get a better close up picture than those we got last January when we watched the flock walking in the rain on the golf course.

One thing that was on our minds as we looked at those turkeys was the big feet they have with those long claws. My husband and I are both aware of how roosters attack humans by jumping at them with their feet first landing on one of the human’s leg digging their claws into the leg. This is how roosters defend their hens when it is necessary for them to do this.
We don’t want to get too close to the wild turkeys just in case they do the same behavior when they feel a human is challenging them.

Many years ago I took care of a flock of domesticated chickens for a person I knew who was on a summer vacation. One morning while I was gathering eggs in the hen house the resident rooster challenged me, and jumped at me landing on one of my thick, tall rubber boots that I was wearing. I wore these boots to insulate myself from the muck of the henhouse. If I hadn’t been wearing those thick boots that rooster would have done some real damage to me with his claws, and especially with the sharp, middle claw that they have on their feet.
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Carol Garnier Dutra

Copyright © 2010 by Carol Garnier Dutra