Dinosaurs
Every fall, Sandy puts out corn for the deer, with a trail camera[1] to keep track of who comes in. And we don’t just get deer. We get these, too.
These are wild turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo) coming in on November 21, 2020. And if anyone is still dubious about the idea that birds are actually the surviving dinosaurs, I think these are a pretty convincing argument. They are big, have a very dinosaur-like shape and gait, and I’m not sure I’d want to tangle with a flock of them.
Turkeys were inhabitants of this area before humans arrived, but were made locally extinct by overhunting by the time I was born. They have been being gradually reintroduced in Michigan for some time, and we first started seeing a couple of them around our house about five years ago.
Since then, the couple of original birds have obviously had a lot of offspring. The local flock has been doing well, possibly at least partially because of the supplemental corn they have been getting just before winter. The flock now appears to be an even dozen.
(that last picture was taken a few days later than the others, on November 30. They seem to cluster into a more compact flock as it gets colder, making it easier to get them all in the picture).
They are pretty cool to have around, and seem to be re-establishing nicely. This spring we saw one all the way up at the tip of the Keweenaw near Copper Harbor, and when I drove down to Escanaba this past summer I saw probably well over 50 of them in flocks that were visible from the road.
I suspect that once they reach adulthood their main predators are coyotes, which we also have in some numbers (there was a pack singing near our house just this morning a bit before sunrise). A whole flock of adult turkeys is probably at least somewhat capable of fighting it out with the coyotes, though, so this is probably a fairly stable situation.
I couldn’t quite tell from the pictures which one was the Tom, but Sandy says when she watches them from her blind it is clear who he is because he’s kind of keeping the flock together and watching out for threats. She says he’s also quite a bit bigger than the rest.
We briefly contemplated putting out corn closer to the house so we could watch the turkeys from the windows. But, after seeing some videos of tom turkeys that had gotten habituated to humans and started attacking cars and chasing people around, we decided that was probably not such a good plan.
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[1] The resolution on the trail cam is not as good as we’d get from a regular camera, but on the other hand I don’t have to sit out in the woods for hours to get pictures like these, either.
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Have you read or watched My Life As a Turkey?
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/my-life-as-a-turkey-introduction/7268/
Carole: Not yet. It sounds interesting, thanks!
There’s a flock of turkeys living somewhere near us – don’t know if they’re in the overgrown orchard across the street or in the woods around the golf course, but I see them in the hedgerow behind the neighbors and every few years I actually see them in the field behind the house after the combines have come through.
I hadn’t realised that wild turkeys had been so rare in MI – there was a flock in the woods behind the house where I grew up. (and pheasants in the hedgerow.)
We have multiple packs of coyotes – on summer nights I can hear three of them singing.