Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [162]
To restore some old-fashioned sex to our farm, I was going to have to scour my sources for some decent sex ed. The Internet was no more help. A search for “turkey mating” scored 670,000 hits, mostly along the lines of this lively dispatch from the Missouri Department of Conservation: “More excitement this week—hunters statewide will find gobblers more responsive to calls! The key to success is sounding like a lovesick turkey hen.”
I already had a lovesick turkey hen, no need to fake that one. I tried limiting my search to domestic turkeys rather than wild ones. I still got thousands of hits, but not one shred of fact about turkey hokey-pokey. I did learn that the bright blue-and-pink growths on a male turkey’s neck are called his “caruncle.” I learned that the name “turkey” for this solely North American bird comes from a 400-year-old geographic mistake made by the English. I learned that the French know this bird as a dindon sauvage. That is when I fled from the electronic library, returning to my limited but reassuring paper pages where I could feel safe from the random onslaught of savage ding-dongs.
Finally there I hit pay dirt. My spouse has a weakness for antique natural history books. His collection of old volumes covers the gamut from Piaget and Audubon to William J. Long, an early-twentieth-century ethologist who attributed animal communications to a telepathic force he called “chumfo.” You may gather that I was desperate, to be plumbing these depths for help around the farm. But I found a thick tome by E. S. E. Hafez called The Behavior of Domestic Animals. Published mid-twentieth century, it’s probably the most modern entry in Steven’s collection, but for my purposes that was exactly the right era: animal science had advanced beyond chumfo, but had not yet taken the tomfoolery out of the toms.
What caught my eye as I flipped through the book was a photograph with this caption: “Female turkey giving the sexual crouch to man…” Bingo! The text confirmed my worst suspicions: turkeys who had imprinted on humans, as hatchlings, would be prone to batting for the hominid team. But given the chance, the book said, they would likely be open-minded about turkey partners as well.
Oh, good! Reading on, I learned that the characteristic droopy “crouch” is the first sign of sexual receptiveness in girl turkeys. Soon we could expect to see a more extended courtship interaction that would include stomping (boy), deeper crouch (girl), then mounting and much treading around as the male manipulated the female’s “erogenous area along the sides of the body,” followed by the complicated “copulatory sequence.” Domestic turkeys are promiscuous, I learned, with no inclination toward pair bonding. Egg laying would begin in about two weeks. A turkey hen’s instinct for sitting on the nest to brood the eggs, if that happened, would be triggered when enough of them accumulated in the nest. The magic number was somewhere between twelve and seventeen eggs.
Eggs and nest were all theoretical at this point, but what concerned me most was the broody instinct getting switched on. These mothering instincts have been bred out of turkeys. For confinement birds the discouragement has been purposeful, and even heirloom breeds are mostly sold by hatcheries that incubate mechanically, so nobody is selecting for good maternal behaviors. Genes get passed on without regard for broody or nonbroody behavior. If anything, it’s probably a bother to hatchery operations when a mother gets possessive about her young.
If I wanted to raise turkeys the natural way, I understood now that I was signing up for a strong possibility of failure, not to mention a deep involvement in the sexual antics of a domestic bird.