The wild turkey strutted on the second-story wood railing with tail feathers fanned out like a deck of cards. Bright red wattles – fleshy skin that hung from his neck – signaled that this was a male of means, even if he uttered noises that sounded suspiciously like a drippy faucet. I had expected more vocal substance from these 20-plus pounds of copper-colored iridescent feathers and lean muscle.
Ever the gastronomic opportunist, he sampled the suet and seeds we had put out and found them satisfactory. He then peered through the sliding glass doors and discovered our two transfixed, indoor-only cats. With his sturdy beak he tapped on the glass to check the boundaries of prudence and safety, perhaps, or to arouse the ga-ga felines to action.
Eyeball-to-eyeball evaluations on opposite sides of the glass suggested an appraisal of a potential meal, but both parties soon ruled that out. Turkeys are omnivores and feast on seeds, berries, insects, frogs and, in a pinch, salamanders. Although cats are carnivores, this Really Big Something required long, judicious study.
As the turkey sashayed back and forth across the deck, two furry heads moved left and then right as though they were tracking a tennis ball during a slow-motion match.
Curious about the turkey’s abrupt appearance, I asked my neighbor Priscilla about his history. He had arrived with a flock during an autumn snowstorm in 2003, she said, when a fresh layer of deep snow changed the local geography and buried bird and other animal food sources. She scattered sunflower seeds for all the hungry turkeys, but one large male flapped his wings aggressively to guard this bonanza until he had eaten his fill. When the snow melted and the flock moved on, the male remained until spring. The following November, he returned alone to Priscilla’s feeder and soon discovered another food source on our deck, much to our delight and the cats’ imagined culinary pleasure.
Whenever my husband and I spotted him ambling though the underbrush, we shouted “turkey alert!” Our cats quickly learned the drill. The words roused them from the warm chair beside the pellet stove to muster before the glass door. There, they crouched and stared with a typical mixture of cat-like disdain and wide-eyed awe as they studied the spectacle swaggering across the deck.
During our first winter in Conifer, he came several times a week to ingest the seeds that had fallen in a pile beneath the second-story feeders. Then, with a mighty swoosh of his wings, he flew up to the deck railing, his preferred afternoon roosting place. After an accusatory glance toward the ever-present felines, the fastidious turkey groomed his feathers until they gleamed and later napped with his beak buried underneath one of his wings. His vulnerability awakened a mothering instinct in me that softened my voice as I cooed to him from behind the glass.
One day, I heard what I thought was someone knocking on the front door, but when I opened it, only telltale claw-like tracks were evident on the snow-covered steps. Our phantom of the porch was now named Pecking Tom.
In late April, we watched him herd five deer across our driveway, flapping his wings like a policeman directing rush-hour traffic. And I wondered about his relationship with the deer. They seemed to tolerate him with studied indifference but moved forward with each flip of his wing. Where were the female turkeys that he should have pursued and wooed by now? Was he an outcast or the last survivor of the 2003 flock?
The deer returned last fall, but Pecking Tom did not. Although a year has passed and it is autumn again, I still listen for his unturkey-like calls whenever I step out on the deck to fill the bird feeders. Perhaps he wandered onto the wrong piece of land during hunting season or discovered a distant place where wild things grow in secret, a food supply far away from human habitats.
Or maybe, just maybe, our unusual guest will announce his presence during the next autumn snowstorm, and we and the cats will enjoy his avian antics once more.
Marilyn Flanigan (marilyn.flanigan@gmail.com) is a geologist and author of “Antarctica: Exploring the Extreme.”
