TURKEYS

by bartermn

Gin misses them too, especially this last one. Of all our homestead births this was the first one she has witnessed.

I was checking the water reservoir and spraying the egg to keep the humidity high. It was day 27. I spotted the tell-tale hole that replaces the built-in air supply and called Gin to watch.

Running out of air would certainly be an incentive to punch through a concrete wall if that's what it took to breath again, but with your nose?

We stood and watched as a circle of flakes were chipped away. I could almost feel the strain that tiny bird was going through as it swung it's head back and forth to hammer at the hard shell of it's cramped prison. It was like toe-nailing a twenty penny spike into an oak beam while crouched in a two foot crawlspace.

After pecking for a half-hour, which must have felt like a year, the turkey gave a mighty shove and the egg hinged open, the poult sprawling flat out, It gave a triumphant PEEP! Gin and I shouted Horray!

This tiny, almost translucent creature was a miracle baby. Our hen turkey's first nest was leveled by a bulldozer, all of the other eggs in her second nest were destroyed by a raccoon.

We had taken three eggs to incubate, leaving Hennie and Tom the rest. I wanted to see a train of homegrown turky poults following Hennie around and to watch as their parents taught them to eat, drink, and hide from dangerous predators like the coon that had ruined my foolish dream.

Gin woke me that fatefull morning with tears in her eyes. On her way to water the garden she had found egg shells and feathers everywhere. She had also found the only good egg yards from the nest site.

Once hidden by an overhanging berry briar, the area was now exposed to the path, briars trampled and broken. The hen was unhurt but from the destruction I could tell she'd tried to protect her clutch of eggs.

The tom turkey was locked in the barn where they both spend their nights now. I wonder what carnage we'd have found if he'd been loose.

To console the depressed hen we showed her the poults we'd hatched. She now roosts near the brooder pen on a 2x4 railing, softly clucking to her orphans. The young ones try to imitate her chirps. Tom ignores them mostly, occasionally gobbling when one of the low-tech bug-zappers catches a moth headed toward the heat lamp.

The whole experience of keeping the pair of turkeys through the winter and two hunting seasons. gambling for this year's holiday dinners paid off. You can buy a twelve pound frozen turkey for the cost of a day-old poult. You're probably thinking, "How much did it cost you to raise two turkeys for a year?"

Well...that's beside the point. If I would have kidnapped more eggs I might have broke even. Maybe next year.