Turkey Day Spa

We have wild turkeys visit the garden from time to time, but this year is much more interesting:

That’s a pair of females, but they’re not alone! Between them they have 11 little poults that follow them around, just like ducklings imprint on their mothers and travel in a line:

When they saw me, the mothers hopped up on the fence. The poults soon followed:

When the little ones jumped up, they had to work a lot harder to get air, and plenty of dust flew out of their wings. It turns out that our garden is their preferred neighborhood spot for dust baths:

If you look closely, you can see five or six little hollows where the babies were getting a dust bath. The chickens do this too — they wallow in the dirt and spread it over their feathers, working it in like dry shampoo. 

This turkey group has got things pretty well together now, but about a week ago Kirk and I saw one of the mothers and her half dozen poults crossing the street at the hospital. The little guys were much smaller then and dutifully following mama in a neat line. Everything was great until mama hopped up a retaining wall and kept going, not realizing that the poults couldn’t jump up that high. They ran along the base of the wall to try to keep up, but she was much higher up. She finally realized her mistake and jumped down to gather them all back up. If it had been a cartoon, she would have had visible beads of sweat bouncing off her head as she used her wings to shoo them all back towards her.

At that point the poults must have only been a few days to a week old. Now they’re probably pushing two weeks, and they can roost in low branches and can fan out to look for good things to eat — hopefully bugs and not broccoli.