320 animal, vegetable, miracle
The real problem, of course, was that I was looking for a category of
information nobody has needed for decades. The whole birds- and-bees
business has been bred out of turkeys completely, so this complex piece
of former animal behavior is now of no concern to anyone. Large- scale
turkey hatcheries artificially inseminate their breeding stock. They extract
the eggs in a similarly sterile manner and roll them into incubators, where
electric warmth and automatic egg- turning devices stand in for mother-
hood. For the farmers who acquire and raise these hatchlings, the story is
even simpler: fatten them as quickly as possible to slaughter size, then off
with their heads. That’s it. Poultry handbooks don’t go into mating behav-
ior because turkey mating has gone the way of rubberized foundation gar-
ments and the drive- in movie.
To restore some old- fashioned sex to our farm, I was going to have to
scour my sources for some decent sex ed. The Internet was no more help.
A search for “turkey mating” scored 670,000 hits, mostly along the lines
of this lively dispatch from the Missouri Department of Conserva-
tion: “More excitement this week—hunters statewide will fi nd gobblers
more responsive to calls! The key to success is sounding like a lovesick
turkey hen.”
I already had a lovesick turkey hen, no need to fake that one. I tried
limiting my search to domestic turkeys rather than wild ones. I still got
thousands of hits, but not one shred of fact about turkey hokey- pokey. I
did learn that the bright blue- and-pink growths on a male turkey’s neck
are called his “caruncle.” I learned that the name “turkey” for this solely
North American bird comes from a 400-year- old geographic mistake
made by the En glish. I learned that the French know this bird as a dindon
sauvage. That is when I fled from the electronic library, returning to my
limited but reassuring paper pages where I could feel safe from the ran-
dom onslaught of savage ding- dongs.
Finally there I hit pay dirt. My spouse has a weakness for antique nat-
ural history books. His collection of old volumes covers the gamut from
Piaget and Audubon to William J. Long, an early- twentieth-century ethol-
ogist who attributed animal communications to a telepathic force he
called “chumfo.” You may gather that I was desperate, to be plumbing
these depths for help around the farm. But I found a thick tome by