hungry month 321E. S. E. Hafez called The Behavior of Domestic Animals. Published mid-
twentieth century, it’s probably the most modern entry in Steven’s collec-
tion, but for my purposes that was exactly the right era: animal science
had advanced beyond chumfo, but had not yet taken the tomfoolery out
of the toms.
What caught my eye as I fl ipped through the book was a photograph
with this caption: “Female turkey giving the sexual crouch to man.. .”
Bingo! The text confirmed my worst suspicions: turkeys who had im-
printed on humans, as hatchlings, would be prone to batting for the hom-
inid team. But given the chance, the book said, they would likely be
open-minded about turkey partners as well.
Oh, good! Reading on, I learned that the characteristic droopy “crouch”
is the first sign of sexual receptiveness in girl turkeys. Soon we could ex-
pect to see a more extended courtship interaction that would include
stomping (boy), deeper crouch (girl), then mounting and much treading
around as the male manipulated the female’s “erogenous area along the
sides of the body,” followed by the complicated “copulatory sequence.”
Domestic turkeys are promiscuous, I learned, with no inclination toward
pair bonding. Egg laying would begin in about two weeks. A turkey hen’s
instinct for sitting on the nest to brood the eggs, if that happened, would
be triggered when enough of them accumulated in the nest. The magic
number was somewhere between twelve and seventeen eggs.
Eggs and nest were all theoretical at this point, but what concerned
me most was the broody instinct getting switched on. These mothering
instincts have been bred out of turkeys. For confinement birds the dis-
couragement has been purposeful, and even heirloom breeds are mostly
sold by hatcheries that incubate mechanically, so nobody is selecting for
good maternal behaviors. Genes get passed on without regard for broody
or nonbroody behavior. If anything, it’s probably a bother to hatchery op-
erations when a mother gets possessive about her young.
If I wanted to raise turkeys the natural way, I understood now that I
was signing up for a strong possibility of failure, not to mention a deep
involvement in the sexual antics of a domestic bird. My interests weren’t
prurient (though you may come to doubt this later in the chapter). As a
biologist and a PTA member, I have a healthy respect for the complex pa-