I saw a wild turkey today

[xiphias]

Driving back from Jiffy Lube. It was walking down Main Street in Wakefield. Ambled across the street, looked at the big piles of snow on the side of the road pushed up by the snowplow, was sort of considering it when I left.

I don't live in a remotely rural area. Wakefield's not a big city, by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a decent sized town of 25 thousand people. It's not really a place you'd expect to see wild turkeys.

Comments

[kightp.livejournal.com]

Back in December I was visiting a friend who lives on the outskirts of town here, and noticed bird-netting strung up to protect all her garden beds. Turns out she's been getting visits from a flock of 25-30 wild turkeys who like to take the shortest distance between two points - stampeding over her plants. I was impressed ... and then I went to leave, drove down her driveway onto the two-lane blacktop, and found myself in the middle of the flock.

They weren't to be hurried out of the way, either. (-:

This on the edge of a town of 50,000. But the bits in between towns are probably wilder here.

[angelovernh.livejournal.com]

Well, the turkey represents shared blessings and harvest. The name turkey is sometimes thought to come from the Hebrew work for peacock - "tukki". The male turkey often keeps several hens. LOL. He's a poly bird..
(these notes come from "Animal-Speak" by Ted Andrews)

[goljerp]

The name turkey is sometimes thought to come from the Hebrew work for peacock - "tukki"

Interesting note: the modern hebrew word for Turkey is "Hodu" -- which is also the name of the country India.

I tried asking the guy from that country who I knew in Israel what the Hindi word for the critter was, but he didn't know, and I don't remember what it was in his native dialect.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I saw some once, when on a train between Toronto and Yonkers, somewhere in the countryside not very near Albany. My reaction was "Look, a turbo-pheasant! No! What the heck was that?" The Canadian person I was travelling with couldn't quite believe I really didn't know what it was.

[jehanna.livejournal.com]

I saw one in Worcester once. They've made such a huge comeback that they even turn up in cities these days.

Of course, out here in Barre we regularly have flocks of them all over the place. Sometimes they like to hang out in the middle of the road and won't be shooed away for anything. You can honk as much as you like, they don't care. Once I saw someone actually have to get out of their car and start pushing to try to get the turkeys off the road. :)

[teddywolf.livejournal.com]

When I lived in Paxton we had the occasional deer cross our property. We had lots of critters nearby.