Figure 1 – Juvenile wild turkey among my hostas. Sudbury, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

Sometimes if you are really lucky Nature comes to you. This morning as I was pulling into my driveway, I discovered a young group of wild turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo) in my backyard. These are the most dinosaur looking of birds. So it was a scene of Jurassic Park among my hostas. I raced to retrieve my camera and chased this flock of fowls into the woods snapping away. Apparently, for wild turkeys, it’s a flock, for domestic turkeys, a gang. The lighting forced me into a suboptimum exposure time for the focal length I was using. But the image came out with decent sharpness and I love the iridescence of the birds neck. The first time that I say on of these guys up close I mistook it for a peacock. Probably this speaks more of my impressionability that the intrinsic quality of turkey plumage. People will call them ugly, but there is a certain beauty and elegance in what Ben Franklin proposed (well kinda sorta…) as the National Bird.

And happily there is an Ogden Nash poem about turkeys.

The Turkey

“There is nothing more perky

Than a masculine turkey.

When he struts he struts

With no ifs or buts.

When his face is apoplectic

His harem grows hectic,

And when he gobbles

Their universe wobbles.”

Canon T2i with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE Mode, 1/125th sec at f/7.1 with no exposure compensation.