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Okay! I haven’t been writing about turkeys as much as I should and Thanksgiving is on THURSDAY! Where did the year go? Fortunately, I still have some pictures left over from my trip home to my parents’ farm back in September. I have written about the geese and the renegade bourbon turkeys of the past, but this year my parents were passing by the grain store and there were poults for sale. So now there is a whole new crop of turkeys running around again (which is good because they are my favorite barnyard creatures). Here are some turkey photos and I show up in them too (both because of the shameful personal vanity which characterizes this era and because the lens on the front of my camera is cracked after an incident with some buttery fingers and an online fruit pie recipe).
If you are curious what breed of turkeys these guys are, they are putatively broad-breasted bronze, but they don’t really look like the broad breasted bronze turkeys of my youth. They are all lanky and tall! These turkeys are pretty endearing and always come over to quizzically see what people are up to, but don’t be fooled–they are not completely domesticated and they are always getting in trouble. Lately they have taken to escaping the poultry yard by walking way back into the woods where there is no fence and then coming back around the outside of the fence so they can stand in the road. It isn’t a completely stupid strategy since there are all sorts of fat grasshoppers and suchlike tasty bus by the road, but people drive fast and carelessly and it takes a big bird some time to get off the ground.
I don’t think my parents have any plans to eat these noble fowl as part of annual giving-of-thanks ritual sacrifice. These are lucky ornamental (or pet?) turkeys, but they are flagrantly transgressing against America’s love affair with motor carriages, open roadways, and unsafe speeds. So maybe the turkeys are walking up the great pyramid towards sacrifice even if they are spared from the platter. Hopefully they can learn road safety before it is too late, because I really like them. Look at those droll facial expressions!
The 2016 Rio Olympics are on their way and already the mascots for the 2016 games have been presented and named! Ferrebeekeeper has been falling down at monitoring mascot news—the winning candidates were chosen back in November of 2014 (whipping up PR stories for a sports competition which is years away is a long & delicate art).
The 2012 Olympics in London featured stupid avant-garde alien blobs Wenlock and Mandeville who were rightly pilloried by everyone (including this blog). The 2014 Russian Olympics featured a mascot election which Vladimir Putin may have tampered with! So what did Brazil come up with for the big game? The nation is beloved for its beaches, beautiful mixed-race populace, and, above all, for the unrivaled biodiversity of the Amazon Basin—where the world’s largest river runs through the planet’s greatest rainforest. Less admirable features of Brazil include deeply corrupt demagogues, insane crime, irrational love of soccer (which is a sort of agonizingly slow version of hockey), and an underperforming economic sector which has always been 20 years away from greatness. What cartoon figure appropriately represents these dramatic juxtapositions?
2016 Rio Olympics Mascots
This blog wanted a tropical armored catfish to win. Barring that, we were hoping for a beautiful Amazon riverine creature of some sort—maybe a river dolphin, a giant otter, or even a pretty toucan. However, the committee which came up with the mascots did not want anything quite so tangible. Instead they chose two magical animal beings which respectively represent the fauna and flora of Brazil. Fortunately, the mascots are pretty cute (and they are both painted with a bewitching array of tropical colors).
The Olympic mascot represents the multitudinous animals of the rainforest and his name is “Vinicius.” Vinicius is some sort of flying monkey-cat with rainbow colored fur and a prehensile tail. The Paralympic mascot is a sort of artichoke-looking sentient vegetable named Tom (so I guess he is male too—although, names aside, it is sometimes hard to tell with plants).
Vinicius’ long sinuous limbs and tail make him admirably suited for illustrating the many different Olympics sports—and I really like pictures of him shooting archery, running, and lifting weights. Tom seems a bit less suited for athletics, but his winning smile and endearing fronds are appealing in their own right. I guess I am happy with the choice of Olympics mascots. They do a fine job representing the world’s fifth most populous country (in so much as cartoon nature spirits can represent a place so large and diverse). I’m looking forward to seeing more of them (even if I might dream sometimes of what could have been instead).
Proposed 2016 Olympics Mascots–a piranha and anteater!
Turkey (Johann Wenzel Peter)
Here is a magnificent turkey painted by naturalistic German master Johann Wenzel Peter (1745-1829) sometime in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. Peter was acutely fond of painting images depicting biblical paradise filled with beautiful animals living in harmony (but with ominous thunder clouds blowing in). This magnificent Narragansett Turkey boldly strutting along in a wilderness beneath a lowering sky looks as though he could almost have come from one of the artist’s religious compositions about the world before the Fall. Peter is almost forgotten now (to such an extent that I can find his art online but can not find a biography) yet the work online reveals that he was the greatest turkey painter of the Enlightenment…and perhaps ever.
Domestic Tom Turkey Gobbling (Photo by WildImages--Charlie Summers)
It has been a long time since I put up a turkey post. In a way this is appropriate, since people other than hunters and farmers usually only think about the majestic fowl around holiday time when the sharp axe comes out (or–more likely—when one wanders over to Krogers to check out the price of Butterballs). Meanwhile live turkeys have been slogging away through the long winter. For farm turkeys this has meant dull days perched in dark coops huddled together for warmth while living on daily water and grain hand-outs from the farmer. For wild turkeys the winter is more like a Russian war novel. The wind, ice, and snow are enlivened by desperate hunger and by fear of omnipresent predators stalking through the bare trees of the frozen forests. The cold nights are filled with the howl of the wind and the coyotes while the days are filled with desperately scraping the dead ground for remnants of food.
But that was winter–spring is here, and with it, mating season. This time of year highlights one of the signature features of turkeys wild and domestic—gobbling. In fact today’s post is really an auditory one. Here is a movie of a Tom turkey gobbling!
The gobble is rightfully the most famous turkey vocalization. It is similar in nature to the humpback’s song or the deafening yodel of the siamang: a magnificent declaration of self which proclaims dominance and health to females. This ululating yodel alerts all nearby hens to the fact that an alpha male tom turkey is in the area and is at the top of his game (it also lets rival males know where to go for a fight and hunters where to go for a meal, so it is a true and heartfelt declaration of bravery and lust on the part of the issuer).
Gobbles are hardly the only turkey vocalizations. Turkeys both wild and domestic are extremely garrulous characters and produce many different calls for a variety of reasons. Here is a list of the more common turkey vocabulary from the national Wild Turkey Federation. By using a variety of tools and the full range of the human voice a tiny number of truly expert hunters can produce most of these noises, however turkeys are clever enough that they don’t usually fall for such guile.
ferrebeekeeper 