A Thankful Turkey : This Bird Is the Center of Attention, but Not at the Table

When I met Mrs. T, she seemed a bit standoffish; after all, I had appeared to her unannounced. As I approached, I could see the skin of her head becoming a deeper, more vivid blue. I thought it best not to rush her, hoping that eventually she would come to me on her own.

“Her skin will change color according to her mood,” said her owner, Julie Schuyler, kneeling to gently stroke the turkey’s naked head and then, down the neck and back, the brown-black, iridescent feathers. As Schuyler petted her, the hen settled toward the dirt of the poultry-filled backyard, one that is an island of country life amid an encroaching sea of city buildings.

“Go ahead, pet her,” she said. “She likes you.”

“How can you tell?” I asked.

“When she sits down like this. Otherwise, she might attack you with her beak.” I tentatively touch her feathers. She weighs about 25 pounds and is 4 years old.

Hank and Julie Schuyler originally bought their pet bird to raise for Thanksgiving dinner but could not bring themselves to do the deed when the time came. Actually, they purchased a pair of poults (baby turkeys); people usually buy more than one, because poults have a high mortality rate. They must be kept in a brooder for their first five weeks, and they are susceptible to poultry diseases such as sinusitis, blackhead and fowl pox--warty spots or blisters that appear on the head and wattle, the folds of loose skin that hang down their necks.

But both the Schuylers’ poults lived, and they turned out to be opposite sexes. “It was funny,” Julie said. “Hannibal was always partial to me, while Mrs. T preferred Hank.

“I think turkeys make excellent pets,” Julie added. “They’re very social. Until Hannibal died, he’d follow me around everywhere. They both thought I was their mother. They’d come up to the back door and stand there for hours, watching us through the screen.”

Imperial Valley farmer Ted Druckman, who, like the Schuylers, hadn’t the heart to harm his turkey, told me: “Turkeys are not ideal pets. They’re aggressive and territorial, and they can be really mean. And the toms, especially during mating season, make an awful racket with their gobbling.”

The females don’t gobble. As I petted Mrs. T, she made a high-pitched “chittering” sound; as she relaxed, the red of her wattle faded from the brilliant red that my arrival had brought on.

Turkeys are only aggressive sometimes, Julie said. “If they get mad at you, they’ll peck at your legs. Their beaks are sharp, and they can bite very hard; they’ll draw blood. Actually, they make great watch animals.”

“One time,” Hank said, “some guys came with new carpets, and she wouldn’t let them out of their truck.”

“But they’re great animals,” Julie said, “once they get used to you.”

There are two species of turkeys: the large white and the broad-breasted bronze. The latter is the multicolored game bird usually pictured surrounded by Pilgrims. The domesticated bronze, though usually better-fed, is virtually identical to the wild turkey, whose natural habitat covers most of the United States and parts of Mexico.

The Mexican wild turkey is somewhat smaller than the northern bird. Having been tamed and bred for food long before Columbus’ arrival in the New World, it was taken to Spain early in the 16th Century. It became popular for food, though Europeans, thinking it had originated in Turkey, misnamed it. World-class eater Henry VIII so enjoyed his first turkey that for years all turkeys raised in England were reserved for the king’s table.

Eventually, the Mexican wild turkey became quite common; there is speculation that the Pilgrims brought turkeys with them to America, only to discover that the birds were abundant in the forests of the Northeast. However, because these northern birds were larger, they were interbred with the European--originally Mexican--stock to increase the latter’s size.

One of the results of that breeding, and of later commercial selective breeding, is the 30- to 35-pound turkey that we buy today. “We’ll have birds grow to 30 pounds in 20 weeks,” says Ron Lowther, a field representative with the Poultryman’s Cooperative Assn. office in Riverside. “They are almost freaks of nature. They’ll get so big they’ll have leg problems and be unable to walk. De-beaking is necessary because they’re cannibalistic, and if one goes down, the others will attack and kill it.”

And, Lowther says, “the trend is toward still-heavier birds. Turkey growers want to get the yields up because it’s become a full-time business, with people eating turkey year-round. Smaller families buy turkey parts instead of the whole bird, and turkey meat is mixed with other meats to make products like turkey pastrami.”

The Schuylers’ birds grew quickly, too. “Hannibal, especially, got very big very fast,” Julie said. Hank estimates that the male bird weighed nearly 70 pounds when it died. “I had a hard time moving it,” he said. “It surprised me. It was mating season, and I think his heart just couldn’t take it, big as he’d gotten.”

“It was a hot day, too,” Julie said, “and they’re sensitive to the heat. I guess we overfed him.”

“Does his widow miss Hannibal?” I asked.

“Maybe she did,” Julie answered, “a little, at first. But she seems happy enough now.”

Ted Druckman, who has been considering turkey farming, told me: “The commercially bred turkeys are about as smart as your average carrot. No wild animal can be totally dumb and still survive, but the factory animals don’t need to be too bright.”

But Julie Schuyler said, somewhat defensively: “All those stories about how they’ll drown while looking up at the sky during a rain are not true. I think they’re very smart.” Hank nodded in agreement.

I stood to take my leave, and the hen stood, too; she eyed my shin speculatively. But she appeared calm. Her bald head was paler blue. She stared into the middle distance and seemed to be contemplating very deep things.