Mrs. T

This is Mrs. T and I “pity the fool” that tries to evict her from our yard. She’s large and she’s in charge. She appeared two weeks ago under one of my birdfeeders. I thought it was humorous at the time, but now she visits the yard 2-3 times per day and I worry she may eventually start mowing down my flowers.

I wasn’t able to capture a photo, but a few days ago I found her sitting on our ceramic birdbath. She was bigger than the entire bowl! Mrs. T likes to scratch around for bird seed under the feeders. When I try to shoo her out of the yard she just moves a few feet and stares at me. If I get a running start at her she will jog, but she won’t be herded. She just runs around the house right back to where she started from.

I carry a stick in my hand when we “jog” just in case. Turkeys can be ornery and mean. Several years ago some wild turkeys made the local news because they were routinely chasing Madison postal workers. In Massachusetts a turkey had to be put down because it kept charging baby strollers. So far Mrs. T and I have a truce, but I have a feeling she has a nest very near our yard. I don’t know what her demeanor will be once the little ones hatch. Right now she just mostly preens or eats and ignores me. I tossed some cracked corn into a side area of our yard to get her away from the flowerbeds. Then I coaxed her in that general direction. She tasted the corn and chortled at me, but returned to the feeder area in our backyard a short time later.

One day I almost caused a traffic mishap when I was chasing Mrs. T around the house yet again. A car happened to be passing by at that moment and the driver saw us “jogging” together, slammed on her brakes and whipped a U-turn to get a better look. I heard her yelling into her phone, “A turkey! A turkey!”

One time I was shooing Mrs. T out of my retaining wall flowerbed and she got herself into a situation where she needed to jump or fly about 3 feet to get to the ground. I’m glad I was standing at a considerable distance because the dust cloud that erupted when she flapped her wings was unbelievable. Once on the ground she shook her wings again and more dust flew out and into the wind.

Wild turkeys can weigh from 5 to almost 25 pounds. Mrs. T’s head reaches almost 3 feet tall. She sneaks up behind me when I’m weeding or doing other garden chores and when I finally notice her I can’t help but shriek or jump. She’s such a big bird!

In the wild, turkeys eat plant matter (oh dear), fruit, nuts, seeds and berries. I watched Mrs. T polish off a weed in my neighbor’s yard. She nonchalantly grabbed a bunch of leaves in her beak as she passed by, swallowed them whole and kept on moving. If she continues to eat weeds she can stay as long as she likes, but I’m not sure she cares about the difference between weeds and cherished flowers. As a result I get a little twitchy every time I spot her strutting around our yard.

Right now I have deer fencing around my flowerbeds to protect my homegrown, still-vulnerable plants from digging chipmunks and squirrels. I usually remove that fencing after a couple of weeks, but I may have to keep it up longer if Mrs. T has plans to stick around the neighborhood.

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