Yes, I know: You’re laughing yourself sick. It’s the title, right? I mean, really, just what does a turkey know? That’s okay. I’d laugh at the title, too. So, go ahead, laugh; I’ll wait.
Better? Okay, now that you’re with me again . . . There’s this very funny bit in Star Trek IV that I’ll bet you all know: that whole Italian food thing? In terms of Trekkie humor, it doesn’t get much better than this. But Kirk’s first line perfectly summarizes my week. Take a look and listen:
Not catching me at my best: that about sums up my week. On top of the root canal, I got this horrible cold. I blame contact with actual human beings. Being a writer is an insular existence–for me, at least. I rarely see other people, although at this time of year, with concerts and rehearsals and Thanksgiving and relatives and their sweet little kids who also happen to be walking petri dishes when it comes to infection . . . I almost always get sick. When I’m VERY unlucky, this happens right before a concert, so I guess I should thank my lucky stars that I got sick the day AFTER.
Now everyone knows: a cold is three days coming, three days with you, three days going. Well, that’s true for most people. Me, I’ve got asthma. So a cold usually means hacking out a lung at best. (Being a doctor means I’m the world’s worst patient when it comes to med compliance. What? Me? Need meds? Don’t be silly.) At worst–if I’m really unlucky–I get bronchitis and then I’m popping horse pills.
So it has been a worst case scenario week of the horse-pill variety, and kind of a pisser because the hubby went off to retrieve a daughter from college and, in little less than three hours, everyone will descend (for a month. A MONTH!). Frankly, I was looking forward to a couple days of savoring my freedom: no one around, no meals to make, no one to bother me in any way except the cats. Time to write and think and read. Maybe catch a movie on my own (I love that).
Instead, I’ve gone through several boxes of tissues and watched turkeys.
Really.
I mentioned a week or so back that wild turkey and ducks and all sorts of birds come through my neck of the woods. This year has been a little strange because the weather was so warm for so long. (You know you’ve been in Wisconsin too long when it’s fifteen degrees and to you, that’s balmy.) The first dump of the season last week also marked the return of the turkeys and ducks to my feeder. But while a small flock of ducks showed (only four this time around, but when the weather gets really rough, I can get upwards of twenty or so at a time), only one turkey did: a female. I just couldn’t figure it and neither could my neighbor, who noticed the same thing. I know the turkeys were around; I saw them over in the next field. But they weren’t coming to see me.
Then, on Tuesday afternoon, I think I figured out why.
This was post-root canal, when I was sipping tea and feeling sorry for myself. I noticed this one female out there but much closer to the house than ever before, on the back porch about five feet from the back door. (The cats were in heaven. At last, a different channel. They spend all their time watching the squirrel channel, the finch channel, the cardinal channel. When I had betas, newts and albino African frogs, the fish and amphibians channel. But now a turkey channel . . .)
I kept an eye on her all afternoon. She wasn’t eating much and seemed interested, primarily, in following the sun and keeping warm. When I went out on Wednesday morning to scatter some corn, she really didn’t move off as quickly as usual. In fact, she didn’t move far at all. Maybe twenty feet away, which is unusual for turkeys. They’re cowards. (Chickadees are not. They are, in a word, cheeky. Most will perch on the feeder and tell you what an idiot you are for waiting so long to feed them and would you mind getting a move on?)
Then I spotted this very big lump under the evergreens and that’s when I knew why this turkey wasn’t going anywhere.
I don’t know if the tom was sick beforehand, maybe hit by a car on his way over to my place, or even poisoned somehow. All I know is that the tom was very big and very dead. Probably no more than a half day, or I’d have noticed. But I wonder now if he’d been hanging around, slowly dying, and the other turkeys who would normally happen by just didn’t.
If you look it up, you’ll see that birds mating for life is supposed to be an urban legend. The articles make distinctions between mating for life, which implies loyalty and all sorts of other emotions that we don’t know if birds even have, and “long-term pair-bonds,” which apparently is a polite way of saying, well, hell, these birds stick together and we don’t know why, but they certainly can’t be feeling what humans do.
Well, that’s just pigeon-poop. There’s this one mating pair of ducks I always recognized because she was a gimp, only had one foot and a stump. She and her guy showed up six, seven years straight, pretty much all year round, and he was very careful with her. Always let her eat first; chased away other males who came near. He was very protective. This was the first spring when I didn’t see her, and so I figure something happened to her because I’d know that duck anywhere. Whether he came or not, I can’t tell. But you get a feeling when you watch pair-bonds and mates; when you see how a male cardinal put seed directly into his mate’s mouth . . . there’s something going on there. (And there is nothing funnier than watching an entire flock of ducks land in your backyard in the middle of a snowstorm and stay, for hours, as close to the feeder as they can manage. And if I just happen to be out there, scattering feed when they want to land? It’s a real hoot watching them start to land, figure out that, wuh-oh, it’s a human. They all start quacking: Pull up, pull-up! Some fly off and do the circling routine again; others land on the roof and wait, like pigeons. It’s pretty funny. Hey, you know, you find your chuckles where you can.)
Anyway, call it what you will, but that female turkey didn’t want to leave her tom. When a bird isn’t interested in eating and keeps looking at and sticking close to a dead mate; when a human like me shows up to bag a very large dead bird and the female doesn’t run away but only moves off about ten feet and watches the whole time . . . I call that grief. I felt sad for her and told her how sorry I was. Call me weird, but you had to be there. I got the same feeling as I had a few years back when a female pheasant, who also came to our feeder on a regular basis, was killed (damn cars). I knew it was her as soon as I saw the body–but what really got to me was her mate, this beautiful male, standing over her, cocking its head from side to side, as if trying to figure out why she wasn’t waking up. He was there a good day and a half; I finally worried he’d be hit (or worse, shot), so I went and took care of her, too, just to get him to move on. He hung around, maybe, six more hours after I was done, and then he left.
This turkey stayed a bit longer: another night and day, actually. She roosted in the tree above the spot where the tom died, and she was there the next morning. By mid-afternoon, though, two other turkey showed up to eat. Today, there have been three so far. Again, not as many as past years–the flock I’ve seen numbers about ten-thirteen–but certainly more. I don’t know if she’s there, but I suspect she is.
So this just goes to show . . . something, I guess. Life is fleeting. Relationships matter. Memory can be both a blessing and a curse. Something. Wittgenstein once wrote that if a lion could speak, we could not understand him. I get what Wittgenstein meant–that our frames of reference would be so alien to one another, we couldn’t possibly relate–but in this case, I think I understand well enough.
Two more hours before the kids come home. I’ve made a nice pear-ginger cake. Now, I’ve just got enough time to put bread in the oven; tidy up a bit; pet a cat; and figure out what I’m going to feed everyone for dinner. Pasta, I think; that’s fast and fun. Oh, and pop another horse-pill.
The birds? I’ve got them covered.
