Why I watch wild turkeys.

Between 1982 and 1983 Mass Wildlife reintroduced 24 wild turkeys (11 male, 13 female) into the Millers River Wildlife Management area in Athol, north of the Quabbin Reservoir.  These turkeys, live-trapped in the Beartown State Forest in Berkshire County, were the offspring of 37 wild turkeys relocated from southwestern New York State.  These Millers River turkeys appear to be thriving.

Located between the Millers River WMA and the Lawton State Forest (itself a miracle of conservation), my backyard hosts turkey flocks all year long.  They make distinctive strut and drag tracks in the snow that are fun to follow in the woods. The cats like to watch them.  They do a thing with their beaks to zip the seedheads off grass--hard to describe.  In flight they look like meatloaves thrown from a flimsy slingshot.  I cannot stop watching them.

During my childhood in the early to mid 1960s inside the 128 loop, we had five kinds of birds: house sparrows, chickadees, robins, starlings and blue jays.  There were no raptors or game birds, no cardinals, no bluebirds, no hummingbirds, no house finches, not even goldfinches or wrens or mockingbirds.  When the insect fogger truck roared down the street on August afternoons we ran outside to dance in the spray.  We were the only living organisms dancing in that spray.  When the bunnies came out from under the yew bushes at dusk to eat clover, they ate poison.  When the birds snapped up sluggish bugs, they swallowed poison.

There were no big box stores then, but all the daddys drove to the hardware stores on Oak Street or High Street to buy bags of poison to put on the grass to make it clean and green. We ran barefoot on the lawn without fear that a bee would sting us.  All the bees were dead.  That world was closely tailored just for people, like a straightjacket.

In the winter of 1989 I was ill and housebound in Cambridge, Mass, near the Charles River.  I cannot remember purchasing a bird feeder, but I must have done since there was a constant battle with my spouse about the seeds that fell onto the staircase below.  After a while a small red bird with stripes began feeding.  I had never seen this bird before and, self-preoccupied and sick as I was, I nevertheless wanted to find out its name.  At the library I took out a 1947 edition of Peterson's Eastern Birds.  The bird was not in it, but there were plenty of other birds, and I began looking for them.  Months later, after I began taking walks at the Mount Auburn Cemetery I bought my own more recently updated field guide--and there was the bird, a house finch.

A few years later, sitting on a front porch in Yarmouth, I heard a song sparrow singing  and said, "That's a song sparrow."  My brother scoffed, "You're making that up.  You can't tell a bird by how it sings."

But I can tell a bird by how it sings.  Just as I can tell from the turkeys in my field that not all of our mistakes are irreparable.

Reference: http://www.mass.gov/dfwele/dfw/wildlife/facts/birds/turkey/turkey_faqs.htm