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She pecked listlessly at some grain on the dirt floor. Probably she’d been hoping for better room service.

What’s to come is still unsure: in delay there lies no plenty. Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty, Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

I left them there, to love again on the morrow. Or maybe in fifteen minutes. After all, they were kids.

Animal behaviorists refer to a mating phenomenon called the “Coolidge effect,” a term deriving from an apocryphal story about the president and first lady. On an official visit to a government farm in Kentucky, they are said to have been impressed by a very industrious rooster. Mrs. Coolidge asked her guide how often the cockerel could be expected to perform his duty, and was informed: “Dozens of times a day.”

“Please tell that to the president,” she said.

The president, upon a moment’s reflection, asked, “Was this with the same hen each time?”

“Oh, no, Mr. President,” the guide replied. “A different one each time.”

The president smiled. “Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge.”

Two weeks after our Lolita came down with lovesickness, the rest of the hens followed. Now we recognized the symptoms. Scientific as always in our barnyard, we applied the Coolidge effect, separating either Big Tom or Bad Tom with a new hen each day in the romantic barn room while the other tom chased the rest of the girls around the pasture. We had to keep the boys apart from one another, not so much because they fought (though they did), but because any time one of them managed to mount a hen, the other would charge like a bowling ball down the lane and topple the lovers most ungracefully, ka-pow. Nothing good was going to come of that.

But after the February of Love dawned over our barnyard, it was followed by the March of the Turkey Eggs. We hoped this was good, although the first attempts looked like just one more wreck along the love-train track. It’s normal for a young bird to need a few tries, to get her oviduct work in order. But to be honest I didn’t even recognize the first one as an egg. I went into the turkey coop to refill the grain bin and almost stepped on a weird thing on the floor. I stooped down to poke at it: a pale bag of fluid, soft to the touch, teardrop-shaped with a rubbery white corkscrew at the pointy end. Hmmm. A small visitor from another planet? I tentatively decided it was an egg, but did not uncork the champagne.

Soon, real eggs followed: larger and more pointed than chickens’ eggs, light brown with a cast of reddish freckles. I was thrilled with the first few. Then suddenly they were everywhere, dropped coyly on the floor like hankies: hither and yon about the coop, outside in the caged run, and even splat on the grass of the pasture. When the urge struck these girls, they delivered, like the unfortunate mothers one hears about having their babies in restaurant foyers and taxicabs.

I had fashioned what I thought to be a respectable turkey nest on the floor in one corner of the coop, but no one was using it. Clearly it didn’t look right to them, maybe not cozy enough. We built a big wooden box with open sides to set over the nest for protection. The turkeys roosted at night on high rafters inside their coop, and always flew around rambunctiously before going to bed. Bourbon Reds have wings and are not afraid to use them. Maybe the nest on the floor would have more appeal, I reasoned, if I made it safe from aerial assault.

This struck some chord in the turkey psyche, but not the right one: the hens immediately began laying eggs on top of the plywood platform, about three feet off the ground. My reference book insisted turkeys will only use floor nests. My turkeys hadn’t heard about that. Within days I had no more eggs on the floor, but nearly two dozen in a precarious clutch on a plywood platform where they could easily roll off and smash. I cut down the sides of a big cardboard box to make a shallow tray, filled it with straw and leaves, and put the eggs in there.

Finally I’d guessed right. The sight of this cozy pile of eggs in a computer-monitor shipping carton was just