184 animal, vegetable, miraclefore. Prior to our move to Virginia I’d raised a few Bourbon Reds as a trial
run, to see how we liked the breed before attempting to found a breeding
flock. I’d gotten five poults and worried from day one about how I would
ever reconcile their darling fuzzy heads with the season of Thanksgiving.
But that summer, with the dawning of adolescent hormones, the cute-
ness problem had resolved itself, and how: four of my five birds turned out
to be male. They forgot all about me, their former mom, and embarked on
a months- long poultry frat party. Picture the classic turkey display, in
which the male turkey spreads his colorful tail feathers in an impressive
fan. Now picture that times four, continuing nonstop, month after month.
The lone female spent the summer probably wishing she’d been born
with the type of eyes that can roll. These guys meant to impress her or die
trying. They shimmied their wing feathers with a sound like rustling taf-
feta, stretched their necks high in the air, and belted out a croaky gobble.
Over and over and over. Our nearest neighbor down the road had called to
ask, tentatively, “Um, I don’t mean to be nosy, but is your rooster sick?”
Many of us were relieved that year at harvest time, when our fi rst tur-
key experiment reached its conclusion. By autumn the boys had begun to
terrify Lily, who was six that year, by rushing at her gobbling when she
entered the poultry yard to feed her chickens. In the beginning she’d lob-
bied to name the turkeys, which I nixed, but I relented later when I saw
what she had in mind. She christened them Mr. Thanksgiving, Mr. Din-
ner, Mr. Sausage, and—in a wild fi rst- grade culinary stretch—Sushi.
So we knew what we were in for now, as our new flock came of age. By
midsummer all our April- born poultry were well settled in. Our poultry
house is a century- old, tin- roofed grain barn with wire- screened sides
covered by a lattice of weathered wood slats. We had remodeled the
building by dividing it into two large rooms, separate nighttime roosting
coops for chickens and turkeys (they don’t cohabit well), secure from
predatory raccoons, possums, coyotes, owls, and large snakes. An entry
room at the front of the building, with doors into both the coops, we used
for storing grain and supplies. The chicken coop had a whole wall of lay-
ing boxes (Lily had high hopes), and a back door that opened directly to
the outdoors—the chickens now ranged freely all over our yard during the