Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, July 7, 1990                   TAG: 9007100413
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A9   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MONTY S. LEITCH
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

ON THE TRACK OF TURKEY LORE

One February, after an especially hard winter, I saw a flock of 20 or more almost every afternoon. Several times, camera in hand, I tried opening the front door as they moved across the sunny face of the hill.

Every time, I flushed them. They rose like beautiful rockets and disappeared into the pines. The lone turkey I've been seeing this spring runs away when the screen door creaks, but I've not seen it fly.

Two or three weeks ago, on a Sunday morning as still as a church, I watched the turkey moving around the field for nearly an hour. It was attracted, as it had been before, by dusty leftovers scattered around the hay bin. But why, I wondered, would a turkey be alone? And why not fly away? Why merely run for cover?

Since then I've been trying to answer these questions, without much success. Our encyclopedia includes almost nothing of use. Gobblers have beards, hens don't, except sometimes.

I've also consulted two libraries. One collection has no books on wild turkeys. The other has only "A Review of the Wild Turkey in Virginia" by Joe Coggin and Charles Peery, published in 1975 by the Commission of Game and Inland Fisheries - an interesting book, but written mostly for hunters.

I also called a friend in Roanoke, a man I know to be a skillful turkey hunter, and asked him what he thought. I described the bird, and he said, when I mentioned the beard, "Well, that's a gobbler, then."

I countered with the encyclopedia's demurrer about the occasional bearded hen.

Hens have slatey-colored heads, he said, and gobblers have white heads.

Then it's a hen, I decided, and he said that just might be. This time of year a sitting hen would likely be off by herself. But if I wanted to make sure, I could check the turkey's droppings, he suggested. "Look for question-mark shapes." So I set off for the field to look for turkey sign.

There was plenty of cattle sign about. I scared up a blacksnake along the driveway - or rather he scared up me. I flushed a deer out of an apple thicket and got a bunch of squirrels really mad. But I didn't find a single speck of anything that might be turkey sign.

Two or three days after that, late one afternoon, I saw my turkey again. I rushed for the binoculars.

The Coggin and Peery book, although it has nothing to say about turkeys off by themselves, does mention the shape and coloration of the contour breast feathers as "one of the best single external characteristics for distinguishing sex in the eastern wild turkey." From the porch, I couldn't see anything at all of this turkey's contour breast feathers. And as soon as the screen door creaked - I thought I might get a bit closer, get a better look - the bird lit out for the trees.

I like thinking my slatey-headed, wispy-bearded turkey is a hen. I like thinking there are 15 or 20 poults scratching about in the underbrush on the cut-over hill to the east. I like thinking there's some slim chance that one morning I'll see them, too.

But maybe I'm watching an irascible old tom instead. Some old ostracized grump the others won't have around. The kind who yells at children, "You rascals get out of my yard!" That'd be just my luck.

Unless I can get close enough to examine those contour breast feathers, I guess I'll never know.