326 animal, vegetable, miracleLolita and one of the toms into their own honeymoon suite, a small pri-
vate room inside the main barn, and removing any watering cans from his
line of sight. She practically had to connect the dots for him—no bras to
unhook, heaven be praised—but finally he started to get the picture. She
crouched, he approached, and finally stopped quivering his tailfeathers to
impress her. After all these many months, it took him a couple of beats to
shift gears from “Get the babe! Get the babe!” to “O- oh yess!” Inch by inch
he walked up onto her back. Then he turned around in circles several
times, s-l- o-w-l-y, like the minute hand of a clock, before appearing to
decide on the correct orientation. I was ready to hear the case for artifi cial
insemination. But it looked now like he was giving it a go.
The fi nal important event after all this awkward foreplay is what bird
scientists call the “cloacal kiss.” A male bird doesn’t have anything you
would call “a member,” or whatever you call it at your house. He just has
an orifice, or cloaca, more or less the same equipment as the female ex-
cept that semen is ejected from his, and eggs come out of hers later on.
Those eggs will be fertile only if the two orifices have previously made the
prescribed kind of well- timed contact.
I watched, I don’t mind saying. Come on, wouldn’t you? Possibly you
would not have stooped quite as low as I did for the better view, but geez,
we don’t get cable out here. And this truly was an extraordinary event,
something that’s nearly gone from our living world. For 99.9 percent of
domestic turkeys, life begins in the syringe and remains sexless to the
end. Few people alive have witnessed what I was about to see.
Cloacal kiss is exactly the right name for it. The male really has to ex-
tend that orifi ce, like puckering up for a big smooch. Try to picture this,
though: he’s standing on her back, tromping steadily and clutching his
lady so as not to fall off. The full complement of her long tail- feather fan
lies between his equipment and hers. The pucker has to be heroic to get
around all that. Robert Browning said it perfectly: Ah, but a man’s reach
should exceed his grasp, or what’s a Heaven for?
Paradise arrives when a fellow has kneaded his lady’s erogenous wing
zones for a long, long time with his feet, until she finally decides her suitor
has worked himself up to the necessary fervor. Without warning, quick as