Mind if We Play Through?

It's a little quieter on the lawns after Labour Day. The wild turkeys take advantage of that... This flock was congregated around one of the Frisbee Golf targets (perhaps turkeys don't like waiting for a tee time?) by Longside cottage.

At this time of year, the young poults are just mastering flight. Which, for a turkey, is a project fraught with peril. When it comes to aerodynamics, turkeys are pretty low on the perch, although they do fly... and every night will fly up into roost trees, settling on the branches like some weird fruit. When they descend in the morning, it can be unnerving, since when one decides to jump off the branch, they all follow suit. If you happen to be near the roost tree when this happens, the sky suddenly rains turkeys.

They are shy and wily creatures, and we didn't see much of them over the summer. Every hike in the bush, or through the back field, yielded a small collection of turkey feathers, however, so we knew they weren't far away.

Back in the spring, however, when romance was in the air and the tom turkeys were in full breeding plumage, we would hear them gobbling in the woods. A friend of ours snapped this incredible photo of a pair -- the tom valiantly trying to attract the hen's attention.

Turkeys like our back fields, which are full of fruit and seeds and great things for turkeys to eat. And we are fond of our wild turkeys, even if they do like to sneak down and intimidate the chickens, stealing all their grain.

Turkeys were re-introduced into southern Ontario some twenty years ago, and have made quite a come-back. Winters were considered to be too harsh for them to survive this far north, but so far, global warming has been on their side.

An interesting aside is that we (Ontario) got the wild turkeys from Michigan. In exchange, we gave them moose, harvested live in Algonquin Park, and transported to the panhandle of the State to rebuild the moose population there. Those transplanted moose are doing very well. It has been said that this exchange was NAFTA in a nutshell -- we gave them moose... they gave us turkeys... but let us not go there!