330 animal, vegetable, miracle
nest of beautiful eggs sitting out in the cold? Potentially viable, valuable
eggs left to die. That many heirloom turkey eggs, purchased mail- order
for incubation, would cost about three hundred dollars, and that is noth-
ing compared with the real products of awkward, earnest turkey love. But
what was I supposed to do, sit on them myself?
That, essentially, is what the professionals do. Our feed store carried
several models of incubators, which I’d scrutinized more than once. This
would be the simple answer: put the eggs in an electric incubator, watch
them hatch, and raise baby turkeys myself, one more time. Turkeys that
would, once again, grow up wanting to mate with something like me.
Is it possible to rear eggs in an incubator and slip them under a female
adult after they’ve hatched? Easy answer: Yes, and she will kill them. Pos-
sibly eat them, as horrifying as that sounds. Motherhood is the largest
work of most lives, and natural selection cannot favor a huge investment
of energy in genes that are not one’s own. It’s straightforward math: the
next generation will contain zero young from individuals whose genes let
them make that choice. In animals other than humans, adoption exists
only in rare and mostly accidental circumstances.
In the case of turkeys, the mother’s brain is programmed to memorize
the sound of her chicks’ peeping the moment they hatch. This communi-
cation cements her bond with her young, causing her to protect them in-
tensely during their vulnerable early weeks, holding her wings out and
crouching to keep the kids hidden under something like a feathery hoop-
skirt, day and night, while they make brief forays out into the world, learn-
ing to find their own food.
Early-twentieth-century experiments (awful ones to contemplate)
showed that deafened mother turkeys were unable to get the all- important
signal from their young. These mothers destroyed their own chicks, even
after sitting on the eggs faithfully for weeks.
My hens seemed to have good ears, but the faithful sitting was not
their long suit. Still, I didn’t buy an incubator. I wanted turkey chicks
raised by turkey mothers, creatures that would literally know how to be
true to their own kind. The project allows no shortcuts. If we could just
get a first generation out of one of these mothers, the next ones would
have both better genes and better rearing.