Paean for "turkels"

    A couple years ago, my wife and I raised bronze turkeys. We were beginners, with no experience and no tutorials on how to raise turkeys, only chickens. The combination of our ignorance and some half-assed, rigged-up living quarters proved to be a deadly one for a number of the poults. (See The Hard Way) We learned that turkeys are tender, perhaps more tender than chicks. They really must have no drafts. And they grow even faster, and thus out-grow any rigged-up living situation rather rapidly. But in the end, most of the turkeys made it to young adulthood. And I fell deeply, madly, irrevocably in love. I learned that “poo pee pee pee peep!” could mean a number of things, based on the intonation. I could be in the garden by the hoophouse, up the hill quite a ways from the young turkeys, and hear a call, and know instantly if I needed to respond or not. One version meant “Danger!,” one meant “I’m hungry!,” another quieter, yet equally insistent one meant “the waterer stopped working and I'm thirsty!” and then there was one that said “I can’t see my friends! Where is everyone?”  There was a different kind of sound the day that one drowned in the sheep’s water trough-- a mistaken pairing of species that I will never, ever repeat.
    As they got older, the peeps turned into barks, burbles and chirps-- they sounded more like seals than any bird. They were so fast, so inquisitive. Gangly, silly, affectionate dinosaurs, they would follow me, chase me over the field. I always had to sneak down toward them, and then, when they saw me, race to get to the food bin before them. If I didn’t, they would leap on it, herd around it, clown around and make things difficult (including always pecking at the buttons on whatever shirt or coat I was wearing).
    I like chickens quite a bit. When well-kept and clean, I think chickens are beautiful and interesting, a little silly, and sometimes surprisingly fast and smart, and can be affectionate. But I loved turkeys-- the way the corn stubble and pea vines shook as they gleaned the fields, their conversational barks and burbles, their unfathomable black eyes peering at me from cocked heads on their unsightly dinosaur necks. What is this deep love for something so completely alien, so utterly non-mammalian? And these weren’t even heirloom breed turkeys. Sure, they weren’t the white giants reputed to have had all the brains bred out of them along with their ability to procreate naturally. These were just bronze turkeys that could get pretty huge but otherwise looked remarkably like their wild cousins. No one is watching their genetics; Slow Food is not touting their wonderful characteristics; normal people wouldn’t write a paean for these turkeys. Still, it’s been two years since that one-and-only experience raising them, and I can’t wait to have them in my life again.