Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [167]
Most of them did try, a little. As time passed and the pile grew to ridiculous proportions, they seemed to feel some dim sense of obligation. A hen would sit on the eggs for an hour. Then she’d hop up, wander away, and go get a snack. Or she would land on the nest, lay one egg, tromp around on the pile until she’d broken two, then eat them and go bye-bye. Often two hens would sit on the eggs together, amiable for awhile until they’d begin to tussle with one another. Sometimes this would escalate until they were fanning their tail feathers and displaying at one another, exactly the way the males do. Then, suddenly, they’d quit and go do lunch together. I became hopeful when one hen (not always the same one) would stay on the eggs until late morning, when I usually let all the turkeys out into the pasture. She would stay behind as the sisters nattered out the door, but always after a while she would decide she’d had all she could take of that, and scream to be let out with her friends for the rest of the day.
With all due respect for very young mothers who are devoted to their children, I began to think of my hens as teen moms of the more stereotypical kind. “I’m not ready to be tied down” was the general mindset. “Free bird” was the anthem. Nobody was worrying over this growing pile of eggs, except me. I fretted as they strolled away, scolding each slacker mother: You turkey! Dindon sauvage, pardon my French. You’ve made your nest, now sit on it.
My nagging had the predictable effect, i.e. none. I felt bereft. Most nights were still below freezing. What could be more pitiful than a huge nest of beautiful eggs sitting out in the cold? Potentially viable, valuable eggs left to die. That many heirloom turkey eggs, purchased mail-order for incubation, would cost about three hundred dollars, and that is nothing compared with the real products of awkward, earnest turkey love. But what was I supposed to do, sit on them myself?
That, essentially, is what the professionals do. Our feed store carried several models of incubators, which I’d scrutinized more than once. This would be the simple answer: put the eggs in an electric incubator, watch them hatch, and raise baby turkeys myself, one more time. Turkeys that would, once again, grow up wanting to mate with something like me.
Is it possible to rear eggs in an incubator and slip them under a female adult after they’ve hatched? Easy answer: Yes, and she will kill them. Possibly eat them, as horrifying as that sounds. Motherhood is the largest work of most lives, and natural selection cannot favor a huge investment of energy in genes that are not one’s own. It’s straightforward math: the next generation will contain zero young from individuals whose genes let them make that choice. In animals other than humans, adoption exists only in rare and mostly accidental circumstances.
In the case of turkeys, the mother’s brain is programmed to memorize the sound of her chicks’ peeping the moment they hatch. This communication cements her bond with her young, causing her to protect them intensely during their vulnerable early weeks, holding her wings out and crouching to keep the kids hidden under something like a feathery hoop-skirt, day and night, while they make brief forays out into the world, learning to find their own food.
Early-twentieth-century experiments (awful ones to contemplate) showed that deafened mother turkeys were unable to get the all-important signal from their young. These mothers destroyed their own chicks, even after sitting on the eggs faithfully for weeks.
My hens seemed to have good ears, but the faithful sitting was not their long suit. Still, I didn’t buy an incubator. I wanted turkey chicks raised by turkey mothers, creatures that would literally know how to be true to their