Published: September 04, 2008 09:54 am         

Up, up, and away?

Time to talk turkey with you again, friends. Back when I last told you about our small flock of turkeys, the poults were about six weeks old. They were small, unattractive, and notably smelly.

More than any other cause, that smell came from the need to keep them confined in a six square foot wire cage, under a heat lamp, and out of drafts inside the barn. I changed the paper in their cage regularly but just couldn’t keep up with their production. Never got to the point of putting a clothespin on my nose, but I came close.

The reason for keeping them in such controlled conditions is surprising. Unlike chicks, turkey poults are very fragile. Their immune systems don’t really kick in till they’re about seven weeks old. Before that, almost any drifting germ can snuff them. In spite of best efforts, we lost two of our original six. A week or so later, we found a third lying stiff on the cage’s poopy floor.

The stink, however, is history. For the last five weeks they’ve been out of the barn and living in the former pig house: a hundred square feet of floor, good ventilation, and even views out the screened windows of a much larger world. At 12 weeks they’re fully feathered and weigh about five pounds each. And they’ve reached a milestone moment for this breed. You may remember that the turkeys are Narragansetts, a breed developed by early Rhode Islanders who bred turkeys brought from England with native wild birds. The result was a strong, graceful turkey with feathers of black, brown, and dun. At 12 weeks they’re ready to forage and to fly, and hence the milestone moment, for them and for us. It was time to open the door and cross our fingers — time for The Running of the Turkeys. The theory is that, having spent so much time being fed, watered, and otherwise cosseted, the turkeys will continue to think of the pig shed as home base. They’ll come home to roost each night, and we can close them in, safe against predators. But in setting them free, we really had no idea what to expect. Maybe they’d hang out in the hood; but maybe they’d go up, up, and away, over the distant treetops, never to be seen again. I had a parallel loss to that early in my farm education here. I’d got a bunch of ducks that initially seemed very happy with the shelter, fenced yard and wading pool I’d provided them. But the first time I forgot to close their gate, they waddled off across a field, down a wooded slope, and formed up as a flotilla on Oaks Creek. Lord knows where they ended up. Maybe they traveled the Susquehanna’s length, and now their descendents are quacking happily in some cove off the Chesapeake. The Running of the Turkeys drew a small crowd to our place on Labor Day. Good friends came up from Oneonta, bringing visiting relatives with them. Brian Phillips stopped by to drop off some trim work he’d done for us, and he ended joining the gathering. As did Carl Good, who intended only to leave some paperwork with Anne but just couldn’t leave. We sat quietly in a ring of lawn chairs behind the barn as Anne climbed down into the pig yard and opened the door.

If we were expecting something sudden and dramatic, we were disappointed. First, three necks, long and scrawny, stuck out the doorway, and goggle eyes surveyed the outside world.

Then, one by one, they hopped off the doorstep, ate a few strands of grass, and then walked right over to the fence and us.

“They’re looking for Jim,” said Anne, now back in our midst. “He’s taken care of them almost since birth, and they think he’s Momma.” Lots of laughter.

Of course I’m not comfortable with that title, but there’s a bigger embarrassment. The one female among the birds has taken an unnatural, cross-species shine to me. Whenever I go into the back yard, she now walks the fence line, poking her head through every open square in the woven wire, all the while softly whistling at me in a really disturbing way. I’ve pointed out to her that she has two growing toms right in the field with her, but so far that’s done no good. The best I can hope for is that she’s in a passing adolescent phase and will realize that we have no future together.

But, yes, they’re still all in the fenced pasture, seemingly happy to spend the day slaughtering bugs and slugs. (More power to them, I say.) They do spread powerful wings and fly the pasture’s length, and the four-foot fence is really no barrier to them. So there may be an upup- and-away yet.

This causes me real worry — no, not maternal worry. I’m worried that turkey season is only weeks away.

These birds are tame and dumb enough to walk right up to a hunter.

Find out about Jim Atwell’s book, “From Fly Creek — Celebrating Life in Leatherstocking Country” at www. JimAtwell.com.