Entertainment

It is easy to entertain yourself when there are turkeys present. We had heard that turkeys were not the brightest bulb on the shelf but one doesn't fully appreciate how truly lacking in gray mater they are until you have spent some time observing them.

A bit over a year ago we bartered for two Bourbon Red toms. These boys were not yet old enough to see each other as competition. The fact that we didn't have any females around for them to fight over may have also had something to do with it. Regardless of the cause, these two boys were devoted to each other. They came to us as totally free-ranging birds so we opted to leave them thus. Soon they decided that the fence surrounding the goat pens were the perfect place to roost for the night. So they would spend the nights sleeping side by side on the fence. In the morning when they woke up they would hop off the fence, ready to start the new day. The problem came in when they would hop onto opposite sides of the fence. When they found themselves separated from each other by the fence that they were too big to crawl through, they would spend the day running back and forth on opposite sides of the fence trying to figure out how to get together. Unless someone took pity on them and tossed one turkey over to the pother, they would remain running back and forth in distress all day until night time when they would once more hop onto the fence and find themselves roosting together again.

This morning I was sitting at the computer answering email when I heard knocking at the window. I turned to pull the curtain open, ready to remind my errant child that we do not knock on windows for eventually this causes them to break. What I found instead was a turkey pecking at the window--futilely trying to catch the fly buzzing on the inside of the window.

We won't even go into how many baby turkeys we have lost due to the mother's mothering attempts--or lack thereof.

Suffice it to say, I have to say that not even teenaged nubian bucks are as brainless as turkeys.

Which makes it far easier to eat a turkey than a goat. At least for me.