Turkeys: Sympathy, Sensibility, and Sentience... Plus Social Dancing and Driving Off Predators...
"Frequently as many as eight or ten will participate in a sort of chase during which they will run at each other, then dodge suddenly, missing a collision by inches. Sometimes they will duck through or around a patch of brush or put their companions off guard.”
[This article was first published Nov. 19, 2019 on the Animals 24-7 website.]
Sunset Turkey collage - Beth Clifton, Animals 24-7
An emotional behavior in turkeys that has been said to “defy logic” is
“the great wake” they will hold over a fallen companion. In one episode,
cited by A.W. Schorger in The Wild Turkey: Its History and Domestication on
page 149, the wing beat of a turkey hen who had been shot brought a flock
that stopped beside the dying bird instead of running away as “expected.”
John James Audubon (1785-1851) wrote how, after he shot a female turkey
sitting on a fence, the male birds responded to her cries: “I looked over
the log, and saw about thirty fine cocks advancing rather cautiously towards
the very spot where I lay concealed. They came so near that the light in
their eyes could easily be perceived, when I fired one barrel, and killed
three. The rest, instead of flying off, fell a strutting around their dead
companions.”
Turkeys in the mist in Maine - photo by Hope Cruser
(Audubon, it must be mentioned, murdered thousands of birds, both as
models for his paintings and for sport. See Wildlife in America author Peter
Matthiessen, 86 for details.)
Similar behavior has been observed in turkeys on factory farms. When, as
frequently happens in those places, a bird has a convulsive heart attack,
three or four others will surround their dead companion and die on the spot
themselves. The National Turkey Federation wants people to think that this,
which it calls “hysteria,” proves that turkeys are not intelligent. What
their behavior actually reveals is an empathetic sensibility that should
awaken us to how terribly we treat them and make us stop.
Observers have marveled at “the great speed of the transplanting of sound”
from one bird to another within a flock at a moment’s danger. One bird
having begun gobbling, the others follow him so quickly that “it is
impossible for the human ear to detect an interval” or to determine which
bird started the chorus or caused it to cease (Schorger, 152).
In Illumination in the Flatwoods, ethologist Joe Hutto on pages 154-155
describes how his 3-month-old motherless turkeys, upon seeing him in the
morning, would drop down from where they sat “softly chattering” in a tree,
stretch their wings and do a little dance, “a joyful happy dance, expressing
an exuberance.”
Not only do young turkeys do this. As Schorger quoted another witness:
“I heard a flock of wild turkeys calling. . . . They were just having a
twilight frolic before going to roost. They kept dashing at one another in
mock anger, stridently calling all the while, almost playing leapfrog in
their antics. Their notes were bold and clear. . . . For about five minutes
they played on the brown pine-straw floor of the forest, then as if at a
signal, they assumed a sudden stealth and stole off in the glimmering
shadows.
Yet another witness quoted by Schorger describes adult turkeys playing
together on cold mornings:
“Frequently as many as eight or ten will participate in a sort of chase
during which they will run at each other, then dodge suddenly, missing a
collision by inches. Sometimes they will duck through or around a patch of
brush or put their companions off guard.”
Photo - United Poultry Concerns
A mother turkey fights off a hawk
“Now I have seen the turkey hen fight with a passion that would make the
eagle seem tame.”
Everette M. Prosise, in a fall 1999 letter to Virginia Tech Magazine, described an awesome mother turkey fly into action to protect her poults from a hawk in rural Virginia:
“I saw a turkey coming into the back field. She had about 10 babies about
the size of large quail walking with her. . . . Without warming, the hen
took off vertically as if she had stepped on a mine. About 20 feet off the
ground, she intercepted and attacked a hawk that was coming in for a baby.
The hen hit the hawk with her feet first and with her back almost parallel
to the ground. The hawk flew toward the back of the field with the turkey
hen in pursuit; it turned back towards the babies, and the hen hit it again.
“They both fell about 10 feet and were fighting with their feet, until the
hawk headed for the tree line and kept going. The hen returned to her
babies. When they went back into the pines, the babies were very close to
their mother’s feet. Wish you could have seen it.”
Thanks to this keen observer, we did!
References:
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