Turkey Invades Neighbors

No, this isn't political....not that turkey....this turkey!


Calling all turkeys! It's mating season...

Last year we had an early morning visit of perhaps a dozen of the giant parakeets. This morning I was awoken by the sounds of an invasion! I took some of these from my apartment balcony and then walked around to the front of my building and found even more of the long legged things. For a moment I was thinking seriously about Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds in the scene where thousands of crows start gathering around the town. Look at this! I counted more than 100 of the noisy beasts.

It became surreal as more and more of my fellow apartment dwellers came out with their cameras and kids to gawk and squawk back at the turkeys. Each time a vehicle would need to drive through the rush hour turkey traffic, they'd have to honk their horns to get the flock to part their sea of feathers long enough to let the car drive through.

At one point, all the toms were gathered on top of one of the mounds, eye to eye and ruffled tail to ruffled tail strutting and puffing in competition to show off their male prowess to the ladies.

In my mind, a commentator was saying:

"today in Citrus Heights a summit of the world leaders have gathered to air their differences and seek resolution to the ongoing buildup of tension between their countries.


I tried to take a picture of that so I could send it to the local TV station with that caption, but by that time the batteries in my camera ran out... Ah well...

Everyone kept commenting that they'd never seen so many turkeys here before. There must have been a huge population explosion last year. I'm surprised and impressed that the environment around here is able to support them nutritionally and the neighboring humans are so tolerate of the big splatterers.