Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [161]
“She needs some fresh pasture,” I said defensively. “She has some kind of droopy sickness.”
“She looks fine,” he said (which was maddeningly true), and went back to the fence that’s meant to discourage deer from eating our young pear orchard. For a few minutes I watched Ms. Turkey happily foraging among the trees, pecking at seed heads, alerting to any small movement of insects among the clumps of grass. She seemed as healthy as the day she was born. Some of our trees, on the other hand, showed signs of deer damage. I inspected them closely and considered going back up to the shed to get the lop shears. This winter day would be a good time for pruning the fruit trees.
Steven yelled, “Hey, knock it off!”
I looked up to see he wasn’t talking to me. My charge had wandered over to him, approaching from behind and reaching up with her beak to give his jacket a good tug, issuing a turkey mandative I would translate as: Hey, look at me!
He nudged her away, but she persisted. After several more tugs, he turned to face her directly, planted his feet, and made a very manly sort of huff. On that cue she coyly turned her tail toward him, jutted her neck, and dropped her wings to the ground.
Oh, my goodness. It wasn’t Hey, look at me. It was Hey, sailor, new in town? That’s what she had: love sickness. Steven shot me a look I will not translate here.
“Stop that,” I yelled. “He is so not your type!” I ran to interrupt her, in case she meant to move their relationship to the next level.
Poor thing, how would she know? She was raised by humans, with no opportunity to imprint on adult turkeys of either gender or observe proper turkey relations. As far as she knew, I was her mother. It’s only logical that the person I married would strike her as a good catch.
As quickly as possible I ushered her back to the turkey pen, putting the kibosh on her plot to win away my husband. But now what? We’d kept two males and six females for breeding purposes, with no real logic behind this number beyond a hope that we’d still have enough, in case we lost any birds over the winter. Were they now all about to come into season? Would our two toms suddenly wake up and start killing each other over this droopy Lolita? And what about the other hens? Who needed to be separated from whom, for how long? Would every hen need her own nest, and if so, what would it look like?
I had assumed I’d cross all these bridges when I came to them. I remember harboring exactly this kind of unauthorized confidence before I had my first baby, also, only to look back eventually upon my ignorance and bang my head with the flat of my hand. Now, suddenly, long before I’d ever expected any shenanigans, like parents of turkey teens everywhere, I was caught by surprise. They’re too young for this, it’s only February! I went indoors to check our farm library for anything I could find about turkey mating behavior.
I spent way too much of a beautiful day inside, on the floor, with books stacked all around me. Our poultry husbandry manuals contained a total of nothing about turkey sex. I kept looking, checking indices for various barnyard euphemisms: nothing. Honestly, our kids’ bookshelves had over the years been furnished with more literature in the “Now That You’re Growing Up” department. You’d think some turkey fundamentalists had been in here burning books.
The real problem, of course, was that I was looking for a category of information nobody has needed for decades. The whole birds-and-bees business has been bred out of turkeys completely, so this complex piece of former animal behavior is now of no concern to anyone. Large-scale turkey hatcheries artificially inseminate their breeding stock. They extract the eggs in a similarly sterile manner and roll them into incubators, where electric warmth and automatic egg-turning