Turkeys, a rather interesting bird that can bring out a number of emotions in a person from admiration of a nicely trussed bird fresh from the oven on Thanksgiving Day to appreciation of the beauty in a splendid strutting Tom courting his hen. There are other emotions that sometimes rise to the surface as well such as the joy of seeing a hen trundling along with a newly hatched clutch of fluffy chicks hurrying to keep up with her to pure irritation when one goes to milk one’s cow in the winter months and discovers turkeys have been roosting in the tree right above where the milk cow likes to sleep, leaving black, tarry deposits on said cow’s back! Then those turkeys bring out a volley of thoughts which are not the most ladylike and yes; do on occasion manifest themselves as words.
Now I do like the turkeys. It really is fun to see the changes occurring in the Toms and hens as springtime approaches. The Tom’s start to show off for their prospective mates with some spectacular displays that include deep booming sounds as they puff out their chests, fan their tails, drag their wing tips and strut. The hens for their part trundle about in a very nonchalant way, making little clucking chirping sounds as they peck here and there seeming the whole while to be studiously ignoring the courting efforts of the Toms. However when a Tom catches her eye it is the hen who initiates the mating routine by picking the Tom who looks most desirable to her thus allowing his genes to carry on in her clutch of eggs and subsequent chicks.
The story of how turkeys came back to the Monument and surrounding area is one I feel worth telling. Many years ago, according to our elderly neighbours across the road who sadly are no longer with us, there used to be a goodly number of wild turkeys in the area. Family needs and other types of predation pretty much wiped 
out the wild turkey population over the years. Darrell was still working primarily over in Bend with his electrical contracting business but did occasionally find time to do the odd electrical job for folks in the area. One such occasion was a small job for a fellow in Spray who used to raise wild game birds for the Fish & Wildlife Department as well as ranchers and other folks who wanted to establish or re-establish game birds on their property. As part payment for his work, Darrell came home one day with ten wild turkeys; seven hens and three toms.
These were mature birds and very wild! We clipped their wing feathers so as to keep them in the pen we made for them, with the purpose of collecting the hen’s eggs, incubating them and selling the day old chicks. We have always raised our own holiday turkeys from little day old chicks as well as numerous meat chickens and layer hens so thought nothing of digging out the old incubator Darrell has had for donkey’s ages and putting it to work. We subsequently bought two more modern incubators and the chick raising endeavour began. It is quite rewarding to gather a clutch of eggs, pop them in an incubator and approximately thirty days later have little chicks hatch out. We did this a few times and found a ready market for the little birds. The adult birds are not nearly so charming! Wild turkeys have a propensity to renew flight feathers at an extraordinary rate and we found ourselves continually having to recrop their wings as some were getting quite adept at managing, rather lopsidedly for sure, to fly out of their pen as at that time we did not have a roof on it. We also had noticed one morning a wild turkey tom, with a metal band on his leg sitting high up in the big pine tree by the turkey pen, talking away to the hens down below him. This prompted us to forgo trying to keep our wild turkeys captive in the pen and when they flew out we just let them go thinking they would stick around for handouts of food. Now we knew a chap at the Fish & Wildlife department in Heppner and let him know about the turkeys we had been raising and he was pretty excited about the prospect of re-establishing true wild turkeys in the area so with his blessing we just let Nature take its course.
My goodness has Nature helped things along! From that early beginning of ten wild turkeys many years ago, there is now a very healthy population of birds in our area as well as other places near and far. This has been both a blessing and a bane as the first winter we saw about 50 or so birds return to spend the cold winter months at our place then as the years went by this number has grown to occasionally over 400 birds descending on us or as we say “come home to roost for the winter”! Now a handful of birds are one thing, a few hundred is something else! As much as I enjoy the spring spectacle of strutting Toms and do enjoy seeing the fledgling chicks later on, I am not so enamored of a couple hundred full grown birds roosting in the trees in the neighbourhood of our milk cows and pigs. This in turn has led to folks obtaining birds from us over the years for transplanting to their own ranches plus the Fish & Wildlife came out and trapped a number of birds which then were relocated to numerous places in eastern Oregon. The advent of so many turkeys in our area has brought a bit of a boost to the local economy as turkey hunters come each spring to try their luck at harvesting a nice big Tom. Darrell’s turkey raising endeavour has been quite a success I would say!
These wily birds, not nearly so stupid a fowl as folks may think, are not as easy to harvest as many assume. They are wise to the ways of hunters and can be quite a challenge for the first time as well as seasoned turkey hunter alike. Many is the time we have witnessed these birds outwit the camouflaged hunter who has been trying mightily to coax in a fine looking Tom. However, many of those same spring turkey hunters will tell you, the fun of trying to harvest a bird is what makes them come back time and time again. So as the turkey hunters we have visiting us right now prepare for their final attempt to harvest a bird, as often happens, as soon as they pack up their belongings and drive away down the lane on their journey home, we will look out the kitchen window and invariably there will be a lovely mature Tom turkey right by the bunkhouse… strutting his stuff while a couple of young Jakes look on and a few hens nonchalantly peck the ground. Ahhh… turkeys….
