Today the faculty was blind with hangovers taking a break and invited a guest lecturer to speak. Packing a thermos of hot buttered rum coffee, the class will go out and freeze their buns off listen to Susanl143 give a talk on raising turkey talk.
http://
Talkin' Turkey
I’m raising heritage breed turkeys – Royal Palm is the breed. There are about 1200 listed breeding pairs in the world. Breeding these turkeys is my tiny effort to protect the genetic diversity of the world. So far, this has been mostly a pilot project. My first breeding season last spring was a flop. My guess is the toms were still too young. However, over the summer I bought an incubator I found on Craigslist. The hens were laying although not sitting on the eggs. I collected some eggs and put them in the incubator. Two hatched and were the first turkeys bred from my small flock. The thing I knew but somehow had forgotten was that turkeys imprint on the first living thing they see. To these two babies, I was mom. The second thing I learned but never knew before was that Royal Palm turkey babies can fly at one week of age. Until I found a cover for their bin that worked, they were flying through the living room looking for me. When they would find me, or when I’d come to care for them, they would trill a soft, sweet song of joy instead of their piercing call.
It wasn’t easy to get them to join the flock of older birds as for a long time they could simply walk through the squares in the poultry netting. They would come to the sliding glass doors at the end of my bedroom and fly against the glass, trying to come in and be with me. The older turkeys didn’t help the effort as the hens would peck at the babies when they’d come close, although no baby got hurt by this. At night, all the turkeys would be herded from the pasture into the turkey house. I kept the babies in a wire dog crate inside the turkey house, so they’d be protected from the hens and could eat their food and drink their water without being bothered by the older birds. Finally, after months of this, the flock accepted the babies and the babies stayed with the flock. Partly it was due to the little ones having grown enough so they didn’t fit through the poultry netting any more. One baby got badly tangled in the netting as he tried for one last time to squeeze through. I cut the netting to free him. I was able at last to remove the crate from the turkey house.
Meantime, with winter fast approaching, I had adopted a trained livestock guardian dog, Samara. Samara came from the south, brought north by her owner who was fleeing a domestic abuse situation with her seven children and clearly beloved dog. Unfortunately, her place of refuge was with her mother in a large city, no place for an LGD. Samara found her way to the National Great Pyrenees rescue and not too long afterwards, to me. I had been looking for an LGD for a while but few have experience with turkeys. Samara was an exception to that. She is a gentle, smiling soul who knows her job very well and is wonderful at it, rounding up the turkeys when she perceives a threat and placing herself between the turkeys and whatever threatens.
Awesome, sweet Samara isn’t young for a Pyr. She turns out to be older than the rescue organization thought so they have given me a huge, young Great Pyrenees for Samara to train. Traveler came last month from Mississippi – thin and without a thick coat to face the NH winter. He wasn’t in foster care long and I think he got his name because he ran away from home, as Pyrs tend to do, got lost, and didn’t find food well while he was on his own. Pyr rescue got him out of a kill shelter and soon thereafter he was on a transport north to me. He is a lovely dog and I can tell he’ll be gorgeous once he is returned to prime condition. Meanwhile, I’ve wormed him and feed him large amounts, desperately trying to get some flesh and fur on him in a hurry. He is not good with the turkeys. It isn’t that he wishes them harm but that he is just too big and too boisterous. He bounces around and sometimes lands on a turkey.
The first time I had him turned loose with the turkeys, the turkeys flew the coop and disappeared into the coming darkness. I, with enormous difficulty, got them back home before darkness came and they settled for the night. If they had stayed in the woods overnight, predators would have found them and I’d most likely have had none come morning. I had only two turkeys who had stayed in the pen, and only one of those was a baby who considered me mom. I wasn’t able to reach the turkeys who were almost a half mile up a tree and rock strewn hill from me but I sang the same song to them every night when I’d herd them up to go in their house. From a distance I sang and sang to them and they went home on their own.
Now, all the turkeys have their wings freshly clipped and they are in the taller fencing of the winter pen. I only let Traveler in with them for closely supervised sessions. I still haven’t had the nerve to leave Traveler alone with the turkeys. I envision returning to the pen to find some of my birds dead and just can’t bring myself to take the chance. Each training session has ended before Traveler can get bored and while things are going well, except that the last time he bounced into the turkey house and one of my young toms limped for a while after that. Maybe it was just a coincidence -- maybe not.
The young tom who was limping had been on my list to harvest for Christmas dinner. It just didn’t happen and he is walking fine these days. I don’t want him or his brother in my breeding program and both males will likely fight with the males I do want come spring. I really don’t want to kill them but maybe someone would like to buy them for their own breeding stock as I don’t want them hurting my selected toms either.
I served a ham for Christmas rather than turkey. All my guests expressed some relief at not having to eat someone they knew for dinner.