The Turkeys Who Thought They Were Ducks

In keeping with the traditional turkey theme for November, what follows is the true story about some turkeys that lived on our farm many years ago….

I was teaching back then and carpooling to a school about fifteen miles away with a friend and coworker.  When the school year ended, Mary had a problem.  The turkey eggs in her elementary classroom had not hatched as expected for the final science experiment of the semester.  As we were closing down our classrooms to leave for the summer, Mary and I decided to bring the eggs to my farm home to finish incubating.  While she drove slowly on the hilly roads between the school and my house, I sat in the passenger seat and carefully held the incubator and eggs.  Parking by the back door, we gingerly carried the equipment into the house and hoped the eggs remained undamaged in transit.  

Two days later, tiny pecked holes miraculously began to appear on the shells.  The eggs were still viable and the baby turkeys were hatching!  Three fuzzy turkey poults survived.  Since I knew next to nothing about raising turkeys, I simply added them to a flock of ducklings I had recently purchased.  The turkeys and ducks bonded immediately–and the turkeys grew up believing they were ducks. 

While they had everything turkeys could want—oats to eat, water to drink, and oodles of bugs to chase all day long, they simply did not want to do turkey things.  They only wanted to hang out with the ducks and do duck things—scoop up corn with their bills, waddle around the farmstead, and try to eat grass.  They even wanted to sleep in the duck barn with the ducks.  This worked well until mid-summer when they’d grown too big to squeeze through the little duck door.  After several futile attempts at pushing themselves through the small opening, they relented and climbed the grain elevator each evening at sundown to sleep on the ridge row atop the corncrib.  This arrangement worked well as the corncrib was a short distance from the duck barn and they could rejoin their friends every morning

The trouble really began one summer morning when the ducks waddled down to the farm pond.  Suffering from an identity crisis, the turkeys followed behind and decided to swim with the ducks.  They’d accompanied their friends to the farm pond several times, but never, until that hot morning in July, had they ventured into the water with the ducks. 

What a commotion erupted at the pond!  The birds were in a state of panic, quacking and cackling, with wings flapping and feathers askew!  Swimming in circles, the ducks quacked hysterically while the turkeys sank in the water with their feathers wet to the skin.  Upon hearing the noise and realizing the impending disaster, we ran down the hill, waded out into the water, grabbed the drowning turkeys, and carried them to safety. 

Drying their feathers in the sun and recovering from their brush with death, they must have realized it was too dangerous to keep acting like ducks.   While the ducks continued to live life according to duck rules, the turkeys stayed more to themselves, content with doing turkey things–eating oats, catching bugs, and gobbling at passers-by.  

In November most people think about roasting turkeys for Thanksgiving dinner.  I, on the other hand, remember the summer of 1971 when some eggs hatched out in my kitchen and the turkeys that grew up thinking they were ducks.