My Life As A Turkey

[Pat B]

Tonight at 8pm on PBS.  This is a story of a biologist that lives in Florida. Someone left a clutch of turkey eggs on his porch. He brought them in, incubated and hatched them then spent a year studying them as they grew and discovered their habitat. These pults thought of him as their mom and every day he took them out and about the local woodlands. If you want to know about the lives of turkeys this is a must see program. Wait til you see the ending.

[bjrogg]

Have to try catching that Pat.

Once our neighbor mowed his hay field across the road. I found four baby ducklings under our clothesline.

They adopted me as their new mother. They followed me everywhere. One didn’t survive and died right away but the other three lasted awhile. We decided to call them Hewy, Dewy and Lewy. We didn’t know which one was which but it was very interesting watching them grow.

At first I didn’t know what to feed them. They wouldn’t touch the corn I offered. Then a dandelion seed blew by and they chased after and ate it. Never had to feed them a thing. They ate a bunch of bugs and flies.

Bjrogg

PS definitely could tell a bunch of interesting stories about the time we shared

[Pat B]

I hope you get to watch it BJ. It is quite interesting, funny and somewhat sad at points.

[bjrogg]

Me to Pat

That pretty well sums up my experience with my ducklings to.

After the first one died the others grew fast.

One time we couldn’t find lewy. We looked everywhere for him. Then at night we heard beep, beep  beep, beep, beep

Like Morris code. We figure out it was coming from thee cistern. We took the cover off and shined the flashlight down it. There was lewy paddling around. We lower a plastic ice cream bucket on a rope. He swam right in and we hoisted him out.

They would climb on my belly while I was working under equipment in the shop. Beep beep.

They would walk under the cows while we milked them.

They disappeared one at a time. Not sure if they just felt like it was time to fly or if something got them. The last one to leave was a one legged mallard. It lost one when it got stepped on by a cow. Still wonder what happened to them.

If you see a one legged mallard that seems kinda friendly. Well who knows

Bjrogg

[Pat B]

This biologist could tell if there was a snake around and if it was poisonous or not by the pults clucks, chirps, etc.
 He has also done a similar situation on PBS with a mule deer in Wyoming or somewhere like that, from a bottle fed fawn to helping the hunter carry this mature buck out of the area where he was shot. Can you imaging going through that if you had raised the fawn. Just doing his job.

[Mesophilic]

That was a fun show.  My wife, a city girl, was asking if the rattle snakes were coming around more because of the turkeys.   I had to explain, that no, the snakes were always there but the turkeys are just so good at spotting what we miss.  That really got the gears turning,  and I then said yes, we've probably walked past a ton of rattle snakes, too,  when we go on hikes and whatnot 

[JW_Halverson]

I am scrambling around in my dusty memories trying to remember who...anyway, someone in this forum sent me the DVD of that documentary, Pat.

I don't know how much of it was solid science and how much is anthropomorphism, but I would not be shocked to know that such a vocal and intelligent bird as a wild turkey would have a variety of vocal calls that could be modified and strung together to express limited concepts. I mean we have proof already, we've determined that certain calls are for breeding, some are alarms, some are just general conversation amongst the flock as they are feeding. Researchers now have determined prairie dogs have different warnings for ground predators versus aerial predators in order to give the correct warning to the dogtown.