Its been quite an adventure learning how to care for, corral and handle turkeys. The hardest part has been their need to roam far and wide. I have been letting them out of their pen for a few hours. The only concerns I’ve had in doing this is that they tend to trample and munch on the food growing. Eating it makes sense of enough but snapping young plants under their giant feet was painful to watch. I put mesh up and they stood on the mesh, their body weight pulling it down to the ground. I tried putting chicken wire over plants as this works with other birds but again they just stood on it and smashed everything under the wire. So I tried an experiment. I recorded the content sound a turkey makes when they have found a good source of food. I found it on a website of turkey calls. Its described as a turkey purr. So my thought was that if I go to a spot in my yard near some food and away from my plants, I could pick at the food like I am foraging (the chickens respond to this like I am one of the flock and they see it as a cue to forage at that spot) to draw them close. Then I could play the happy turkey purr like, uh, like it was me talking…right?

What happened was that I foraged, they came over out of curiosity and I hit play. They flushed bright red, whipped around and fanned their tails out and down but towards me like ninja fighting fans. They did it so fast it shocked me. It was clearly a defensive posture. One of my males, Nash, then turned around and approached me in a manner that looked like he was going assert some dominance in a whoop ass kind of way. I had to swat him away and think…what just happened? Then I realized. Imagine if you will, that you are at home washing dishes and minding your business when suddenly a disembodied voice sweetly says over your shoulder “I am so happy. I love the good food here.” That was basically what my experiment did to the turkeys. They are not “dumb” dumb. They know I don’t speak their language. So they knew the vocalization was a foreign turkey that they could not see. Turkeys are very territorial so this was not welcomed.

After this, I let go of trying to use their words to tell them to stay in a preferred area of the yard and instead hoped they would just stay in the yard. Usually when I am home I can show myself every 20 minutes or so (even if I just poke my head out of a back window) and for some reason this keeps them nearby. However, if I run an errand or get wrapped up in a work project and lose track of time, they disappear.

Yesterday may have proved to be the end of leaving them unattended at all. I left them for about 30 minutes and found an empty yard. A quick search found them on a neighbors roof. This slightly disgruntled neighbor was just working his way over to my house to inform me. We went to go take a look at the situation just in time to watch them launch off the roof, flap across the property and land on the other side of the fence in to a 76 Station, much to the auto body shop owner’s amusement. I was able to coax the two males back over with the promise of snacks but I had to go retrieve the female, Fern, and walk back around the block with a bulky turkey under my arm.

Contrary to what this level of flock management suggests, I do work and I don’t actually have time to spend chasing turkeys down in Oakland. So I’ve learned this, with the amount of space I currently have available, three turkeys is the maximum number I can accommodate in a flock and I need more spacious digs for them so they can stretch their wings out and walk around within a run. I don’t know how fellow urban farmer, Novella, is able to keep her turkeys from roaming out of her yard but she said the males she currently has do not leave. I am wondering if it has anything to do with the amount of space they may need to get be able to jump-flap up and out. Novella’s coop quarters is a tighter configuration than my own. I also heard from friend and urban farmer, Stefani in Alameda, that her turkeys also escape but she too has a spacious run way type yard. I may have to contact the UC Davis Poultry Extension for this questions. The learning continues…