Turkey Tussle

Wild Turkeys were successfully re-introduced to southeast Nebraska 35 years ago. The first birds I saw there were “Merriam’s” Turkey, geographically incorrect with their big white tail tips and white-fringed wing coverts. In recent years, I’ve been happy to see that most of the gobblers one sees slinking away through the woods and terrorizing suburban housepets are now honest-to-goodness “Eastern” Turkeys (or something visually very close to it), the chestnut-tipped race that occurred naturally here until about a hundred years ago.

I don’t generally give them a second look at birdfeeders and on lawns, but turkey encounters deep in the forest are a different thing, an experience of continuity and connection with the birds and birders of a century past. And so I lingered to watch a shy tom on the edge of Fontenelle Forest’s Hidden Lake last Monday.

Shy for only a moment.

A second bird–up to then unseen–dropped heavily out of the trees above me and approached the first, which uttered a few low-pitched chugging notes and spread its tali and drooped its wings as if to strut. The newcomer was insufficiently intimidated, I guess, and with snoods aflame, the two went at each other in physical earnest.

And then something I’d read about and somehow never seen.

The two twined their necks, then braced against each other’s breasts, pushing and straining silently for more than ten minutes.

They broke once for some noisy, nasty fisticuffs, wings beating furiously against the air and, once or twice, against each other.

And then it was back to their rasslin’. Points seemed to be scored by keeping one’s head above the other bird’s during the neck lock.

With all that extra flesh, it was often hard to tell who was winning–or even which wattles belonged to which contestant.

From some angles, it was hard to tell even that there were two birds somewhere in the straining mass of feather and wattle.

Victory is attained, I’m told, only when one bird’s head touches the ground. I never saw this happen–but they were still at it when I left them, nearly half an hour after battle was first joined.