hungry month 319huff. 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 be-
hind 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 sea-
son? 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 re-
member harboring exactly this kind of unauthorized confi dence 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 every-
where, I was caught by surprise. They’re too young for this, it’s only Febru-
ary! I went indoors to check our farm library for anything I could fi nd
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.