My Life as a Turkey: Natural World Special Natural World

Day after day, for over a year, I saw no-one, except my family.

It was a family like none that you know.

But I am a mother, it seems, and these are my children.

And soon enough, like all children, they'll leave home and I suppose my heart will be broken.

But, for now, this is my life...

as a turkey.

My name is Joe Hutto.

Some years ago now I spent 18 months raising some wild turkeys from the egg.

And spending all this time alone with a bunch of birds

may appear close to insanity to you, but you don't know turkeys like I do.

No-one has been this close to wild turkeys before.

Maybe, no-one ever will again.

What happened between me and these birds was in fact legitimate science.

But it's also true this experiment of mine left science far behind.

At the time, I had no idea the extent to which I would have actually have to BECOME a wild turkey.

It all started back in 1995 in North Florida...

..when a local farmer was on his way to my cabin with a delivery that would change my life forever.

I was suddenly about to get the eggs that I had been waiting for, for over 30 years.

I came home one afternoon and there was a stainless steel dog bowl filled with eggs on my doorstep.

I had no plans whatsoever so I raced out in the night, found an incubator at a friend's house, brought it back.

They had been without incubation for at least seven or eight hours so I was really concerned.

If I could hatch the eggs, then I hoped I could get the poults to imprint on me

as their mother, and I could gain passage into a secret world.

Imprinting gives a window into the lives

of creatures that you would never have an opportunity to see otherwise.

And so you get an insight that you can't get any other way.

Each one of these eggs harbours a mystery.

It's something untamed and virtually unknown to us...

..an embodiment of wilderness.

And, yes, this is the species from which our domesticated birds come from originally.

But people shouldn't make the mistake

that there's a similarity between these birds

and the ones we've tamed for food.

Wild turkeys are so incredibly different.

Each egg must be properly turned twice a day.

I'm told wild turkeys make utterances to their clutch.

So secretly, in both wild turkey and English, I began to talk turkey.

(Hi, guys.)

HE HONKS

'Almost immediately I started hearing a response from the eggs.'

I would make a turkey-like noise and I would hear distinct little peeps and shrills coming out of these eggs.

But I had this problem.

25 days after incubation begins the mother stops turning the eggs.

But I have no idea when incubation started with these eggs so I had to just guess.

But then, sure enough, cracks began to appear.

This was a crucial time.

This is the moment that the poults must recognise me as a parent.

Imprinting only occurs in these first moments out of the egg.

And then suddenly the end of the egg fell away...

..and this little poult fell out.

And he's wet and he's confused and he's scrambling and it's obviously a desperate time.

Well, I finally remembered to make a sound.

And I made my little turkey sound that I had been making to these eggs.

And the little turkey stopped immediately

and his little shaking, wet head rotated,

and he looked me square in the eyes.

And there was something very unambiguous transpired in that moment.

And he identified me

as the pair of eyes belonging to the correct voice.

And in his way he stumbled and hopped across the floor of the incubator.

And joined me at the edge of the shelf, and huddled up against my face and went to sleep.

And something also moved inside of me, something very profound.

I realised that my involvement in this experiment

was going to be a very personal, very emotional, ride for me,

and not just a science experiment.

It had taken a day and a night, and I was exhausted,

but I was finally mother to 16 wild turkeys.

This all happened very suddenly and I hadn't really anticipated it.

I more or less just disappeared into the forest.

After a very few days I realised that this was a complete,

100% relentless commitment that I had made to these birds and that,

if I was going do this, I was going to have to be a wild turkey parent for some unknown period of time.

I had no idea if this commitment would last weeks or months or,

as it turned out, years.

I'm ignorant about being a turkey mother.

What do they already know?

And what do they need to learn from me?

Today I actually tried to show them how to roost, although I suspect this is something they know already.

It's important to understand these wild birds bear no resemblance to their domestic cousins.

It's the difference between a pet dog and a wolf.

These birds are so wild,

if I leave them alone for any length of time, they will just run and run till they drop dead.

I can already tell them apart, and there's this one I've called Sweet Pea.

She's very little and likes to be held in the hand.

I did have that feeling that this rat snake had literally been waiting on that moment.

I was gone for a very short time. Grabbed a sandwich,

came back out...

There was a six-foot rat snake in the pen

that had completely swallowed one of the young poults.

And now could not get out of the pen, of course, because of the large lump in its body.

I was horrified and the rest of the turkeys were horrified, and it was a terrible moment for all of us.

I realised that these birds absolutely cannot not be left alone.

There are so many predators ready to strike these young birds,

and I just had to make the commitment right there that I'm not going to leave them alone, ever.

They're sort of born with a type of wisdom.

They know things already, they don't have to learn.

They are born entomologists, it's already there.

They don't have to be taught which insect is dangerous, which one is palatable.

They don't have to be taught which snake is harmless and which one is venomous.

They know exactly.

One bird I've started to call Turkey Boy is into everything.

He's inquisitive and brave and he's going to be a handful.

He's already beginning to display to other birds and he's only ten days old!

In spite of this unusual kinship of wild birds and man,

we're experiencing something that feels curiously normal.

Do they think I'm a turkey?

I was starting to understand how they perceived the world around them,

but, still to this day, I wonder what they really thought of me.

I wasn't sure what I had to teach them about the world, it's true,

but I did know it was my job to help be their eyes and ears for danger.

We left early.

We walked not far from the pen because the turkeys were still very young,

and I sat down

and they began busily feeding and doing what young wild turkeys do,

and eating grasshoppers, and chasing insects.

The birds started becoming real wild turkeys for one of the first times.

And so I became a little bit drowsy

and they were enjoying being young wild turkeys.

And suddenly there was an explosion, a blur of movement.

I looked in front of me and a large hawk is mantling on the ground

over one of my turkeys.

His head rotates and looks me square in the eyes with these blazing amber eyes.

So he exploded in flight, and when he did this lump fell to the ground,

and I literally crawled over on my hands and knees and picked up this lifeless body.

And I realised how imminent the threats were, and how dangerous this world was for them.

Cos it's a tough world out there for a young wild turkey.

I felt very responsible, and that I actually had allowed that to happen.

My thoughtlessness had brought about the death of that young bird.

Up until now, it's been a full-time job just keeping them alive.

But now my little experiment is really beginning to pay off.

It seems as if a whole world is opening up to me.

It's not just the birds I'm getting close to.

Somehow they allow me passage into a secret side of these oak hammocks.

The different birds' personalities are expressed in the way they explore the forest.

They even seem to have their own individual interests.

Sweet Pea and Rosita, for example, have a particular fascination with squirrels.

Turkey Boy met a deer today.

I'm amazed how bold he is. He even walked and was nose-to-nose with it.

They were absolutely unafraid, they absolutely knew this creature

was a benevolent neighbour and not a potential predator.

And I thought this was a remarkable discrimination,

considering that a coyote, for example, is a tawny brown animal with big ears and an intense stare.

When I'm with these turkeys, snakes no longer run from me.

Corralled by the birds, a rat snake now turns to face us.

The turkeys know just how to deal with each species of snake.

In spite of their innate knowledge about dangerous things,

they're inherently disturbed by tortoises and turtles!

They just won't leave them alone. I think maybe they view them as a snake in a box.

As any turkey hunter can tell you, no two turkeys behave the same.

I now know each of the birds by their character and personality as much as by their appearance.

Turkey Boy is still up to his old tricks.

He's always pushing his brothers and sisters around, but no-one seems to mind too much.

Sweet Pea still has this need for closeness.

She stares motionless at me for what seems a very long time and it's obviously a conscious behaviour,

it's as though she is trying to absorb something.

Being the object of such intense scrutiny by such a little thing is a very strange sensation.

I'd have to stay with the birds all day, every day until sunset.

Then in the cage the birds would fly up to roost with me, and on me.

And if I tried to leave the roost they would try to follow me,

so I had to stay in the pen until it was completely dark.

Then they would fall sound asleep.

But I had to be there from dawn until after dark every day, and there were no exceptions to that.

As humans, we're born ignorant and helpless.

We're these empty vessels that must be filled with years of experience and study.

But these creatures are heir to tens of millions of years of an accumulated wisdom

that's handed down directly from one to the next, defying mortality.

They have the basic blueprint about all the plants and all the animals.

It's incredibly complete.

But what they don't understand is the lay of the land and that was what I knew.

I knew where the water was.

I knew where the dangers were to some extent.

We didn't go in the direction of the road or to Farmer Rodenberry's house.

I tried to teach them that automobiles where a dangerous thing.

That was very hard to do. Wild turkeys are a 20 million year old bird

and they don't have a blueprint for an automobile or a pickup truck.

In that sense, I taught them some things.

I've been walking these oak hammocks for over 20 years and I had no idea how many rattlesnakes there were.

I'd see maybe two or three in a year.

Now, with these turkeys, we're were finding two or three every day!

They would initiate their rattlesnake call, their very specific rattlesnake alarm call.

It was very disturbing to me that, instead of fleeing the rattlesnake -

that was not their strategy - that they almost displayed an obsession over the rattlesnakes.

Sweet Pea got a little too close for comfort.

These large rattlesnakes are the one thing I fear for me and the birds.

I try not to interfere

but this one giant diamondback was just by the wood pile

and I can't quite stop myself.

I'm just going to take her a few miles away.

Each day, as I leave the confines of my language and culture,

these creatures seem to become in every way my superiors.

They're more alert, sensitive and aware.

They're in many ways, in fact, more intelligent.

Their understanding of the forest is beyond my ability to comprehend.

Turkeys displayed a type of obsession over the sight of a dead animal,

and they would revisit the sites very cautiously, and they would examine

very closely, and occasionally they would actually pick up a bone.

Not in a playful way, but in a curious way,

and drop it.

They would observe the skeleton very intensely.

And it seemed that they never tired of examining

this dead animal and trying to understand what the implication of that was.

That behaviour does not facilitate survival directly.

It's not about predation, it's not about food,

it's about understanding the world.

They had a perfect memory of what that entire forest was supposed to look like.

If any object was out of order, if a new limb had fallen out of a tree,

they would find that limb very disturbing.

They would approach a stump of a fallen tree or a rotted tree,

and that was a fascinating thing as most things are to wild turkeys.

But interestingly, when we approached a very old stump of a tree that had been sawn down by loggers,

something about that was very disturbing to a wild turkey.

I thought it was a fabulous and interesting response but I don't know why.

But here was a stump that had been cut 10, 15, 20 years before,

and yet there was something not right about that.

And the turkeys would find it very interesting and actually disturbing.

I was always a very anxious mother hen,

and, of course, having not done this before, I never knew the right time for things.

One night we came in from our usual on a daily walk

and I expected them to enter the pen like so many times before,

and suddenly their behaviour changed.

And they started eyeing the trees and making sounds.

And, suddenly, a turkey flew up into a tree.

And another turkey flew up and they all began flying up,

and I realised that they had made this decision

that it was time to start roosting in the trees like turkeys.

And they were making contented vocalisations like turkeys

do when they go on the roost, little communication noises, "Here I am, where are you? OK, there you are."

I was feeling a little bit let down, and a little bit like I had been excluded.

This was one turkey activity I couldn't participate in and I felt like I'd been left out.

And I went out feeling insecure,

and I made a little turkey noise, a little mother hen noise.

HE MIMICS TURKEY

And suddenly everybody chattered.

"Here we are, everything is OK."

Turkeys in general have this misplaced reputation for stupidity.

This experiment of mine has proven quite the opposite.

There are many things that suggest wild turkeys are intelligent,

but my experience with learning their vocabulary has taught me how profound this intelligence actually is.

You have to be this close to a creature

to understand how it communicates.

And in fact they have specific vocalisations for individual animals.

And I actually learned these vocalisations,

and, when I would hear a certain vocalisation,

I would know without question they had found a rattlesnake and not a grey rat snake.

I've identified over 30 specific calls

and my vocabulary is growing every day.

I'm learning to talk turkey.

HE MAKES TURKEY CALLS

Interestingly, I learned that within each one of those calls

there are inflections that have very different meanings.

For example, one would be what is known as a purr.

HE MAKES PURRING SOUND

HE MAKES PURRING SOUND

Many different meanings, depending on the inflection.

From, simply, "Here I am, where are you?"

to, "Catastrophe is on the way."

A simple, plain yelp that a hen might do,

a very crude approximation would be...

HE MAKES RAPID YELPS

That would mean, "You're out of sight now and need to come closer."

When turkeys see a hawk soaring in the distance,

and they're not really disturbed by the hawk soaring

but they want everybody to know it's there,

they emit what I called a low nasal whine. An ascending whine.

And it's...

HE MAKES NASAL WHINE SOUND

and it causes everyone to be still and very quiet.

HE WHISTLES

I didn't have the capacity to understand every vocalisation...

..but somehow I had the capacity to understand their meaning

and that was an almost magical thing that occurred

with these young birds.

Their language and their understanding of the ecology shows a remarkable intelligence.

But their ability to understand the world

goes much further than just communication.

I came to realise that these young turkeys

in many ways were more conscious than I was.

And I actually felt a sort of embarrassment

when I was in their presence. They were so in the moment.

And, ultimately, their experience of that manifested into the kind of joy that I don't experience.

And I was very envious of that.

In search of a grasshopper.

It's a calling as strong as any I have ever known.

They're almost three months old

and I find myself a fully fledged member of a turkey gang.

We raid the field like ancient marauding barbarians.

Insects can hop or run away

but they're likely to land at the feet of another.

This is a strategy that must occur with turkeys everywhere.

This is innate communication unlike any I've ever known.

I feel a little like an anthropologist

who after immersing himself in an exotic tribe

is becoming confused about his own social identity.

I haven't started eating grasshoppers yet

but the smooth green ones are beginning to look pretty tasty!

It's hard work being a turkey.

And, as mother, I don't get much me-time.

And Sweet Pea's getting heavier by the day.

Affection is a very abstract concept anyway and very hard to talk about.

And yet I was observing this, everyday.

This need for these turkeys to be touched and for closeness.

And so, in that sense, wild turkeys are very affectionate

and they are very tactile.

I saw it most profoundly in Sweet Pea.

From very early on, Sweet Pea had this overwhelming desire,

to be close and to be touching at all times.

And there was never a time when I was sitting on the ground

when Sweet Pea wasn't in my lap.

And if I sat there, Sweet Pea would go to sleep

and she expected to be stroked and coddled.

And it was a very interesting relationship.

And, of course, I fell for it hook, line and sinker

and just fell head over heels in love with Sweet Pea.

Affection is something you would never anticipate or expect from wild turkeys

and yet it was very apparent

that this was a very important part of their social life.

CROW SQUAWKS

Today, I lost two birds to some unknown illness

and I feel heartbroken.

There is no question about my connection to this family.

And there's no question we all feel some deep sadness.

The effect on the group is palpable.

Emotions are certainly not peculiar to the human experience.

In their observation of death -

the death of another turkey that is a member of their group -

it's a very conscious behaviour,

as if they are trying to understand what the meaning of this is.

THUNDER CLAPS

Shelter from the rain on my porch of my hut

is one of the few perks these birds have gotten

from having such an odd parent.

It seems a long time has passed

since I tended these birds from the egg.

Today, we came across another six-foot diamondback.

It could be the same one I took from the woodpile months ago.

They say that rattlesnakes can find their way home from long distances.

This time I have no fear whatsoever for the birds, though.

And there's no question who's in charge now.

Sweet Pea and Rosita were insistent.

They wanted to escort this rattlesnake out of the area.

The non-venomous indigo snake got an even closer inspection from Turkey Boy.

This kind of intense interaction is born from a desire

to remain in touch with a possible predator.

Although, sometimes it does feel like it's become a bit of a game for them.

I had never considered that the wild turkey was a playful bird...

..but, in fact, they are playful.

They are curious about things

that don't benefit their survival directly.

The white-tailed deer has fawned late this year

and, as always, Turkey Boy is vying for some reaction.

But, this time, he's bitten off more than he can chew.

The young deer can give as good as she gets.

Sweet Pea's favourite is far more amiable.

The fox squirrel seems to want to play as much as she does.

There's no question in my mind

that these birds experience joy in their lives.

But, still to this day,

they can't quite figure out that snake-in-a-box.

I was learning new things about turkeys every day.

But this was not just about how they lived their life.

These animals were showing me how to live my life also.

We do not have a privileged access to reality.

So many of us live either in the past or in the future

and betray the moment.

And, in some sense, we forget to live our lives.

And the wild turkeys were always reminding me to live my life.

I think as humans we have this peculiar predisposition

to be always thinking ahead and living a little bit in the future,

anticipating the next minute, the next hour, the next day,

and we betray the moment.

And wild turkeys don't do that.

They are convinced that everything that they need,

all their needs will be met ONLY in the present moment

and in this space.

And the world is not better a half a mile through the woods,

it's not better an hour from now and it's not better tomorrow.

But this is as good as it gets.

And so, they constantly reminded me to do that.

And to not live in this abstraction of the future,

which by definition will never exist.

And so, we sort of betray our lives in the moment.

And the wild turkeys reminded me to be present. To be here.

For over a year, day after day, we never saw another human being.

But I was never alone.

Actually, I've never kept better company.

We share very similar interests,

snakes, frogs, birds and interesting artefacts

and that's sort of what I'm all about.

I learned many things,

but maybe the most important, was that we're essentially unaware

of the overwhelming complexity that exists all around us.

I'll never see the world in the same way again.

We were all learning together but I can sense they need me less and less each day.

One day soon, I know, I'll walk home alone.

It was late afternoon, I was sitting in the thick forest with Sweet Pea.

We suddenly realised that there were no turkeys around us.

We started looking,

we realised that there were no turkeys in the area.

Sweat Pea became very concerned.

She actually started lost calling.

We walked maybe a quarter of a mile,

and finally we saw turkeys up in the distance.

I thought this was really strange.

And I decided, OK, we're going to head back towards home.

I turned to leave, no-one followed me.

In fact, they started heading out in the opposite direction.

In fact there was a farm in that direction, that had yard dogs,

all sorts of things that we didn't want to encounter.

And I could not get the birds to listen to me, they would not follow,

for the first time ever.

I became very disturbed.

And I lost called and all the vocalisations I need to employ.

They would chatter acknowledgement, but they wouldn't follow me.

And by this time, I was just a nervous wreck,

I was exhausted, I didn't know what was going on.

I thought, I've lost these birds, I'm not going to be able to get them back.

I did not want this to end like this.

Eventually, I tried the same technique.

Got out in front and finally they started veering off.

It took hours, to get the turkeys turned in the direction of home.

But I realised that everything was different now.

The life that we had known for the last six or nine months had changed.

Now I would have to do things their way.

And they were from that point on, fully wild turkeys that came and went as they pleased.

They allowed me to accompany them,

but I was no longer the parent.

I was just another bird.

Wild turkeys grow up fast and I knew my days with them were numbered.

But these turkeys had taught me not to betray the moment

for some abstraction up ahead.

Once again, I'm a man in search of a grasshopper.

It's a calling as strong as any I've ever known.

This makes me wonder sometimes if I've gotten in too deep.

The peace is being broken more and more each day.

It's not just Turkey Boy - now all the males practice displaying,

getting ready to do battle.

The males will need to fight their way to the next stage of their lives.

Only the toughest will get to mate.

And as these practice bouts show,

when the real fighting starts, it'll be ferocious.

As I looked on, I had no way of knowing how I was going to be

a part of this rite of passage.

It's over a year into the project,

and I'm starting to see the birds less and less.

It's natural for the young jakes to move away from the group

and the hens too should be disappearing soon.

But I can't help but feel a deep sadness.

Day after day, they've been my only company.

Sweet Pea still stays close by and Turkey Boy remains the closest of friends,

but some of the others are drifting away.

And then something very special happened.

Sweet Pea started nesting nearby.

If she hatches her brood with me here,

it could start a whole new avenue of research.

A new access to the reality of the wild turkey.

I had notions of possibly being able to do

a partial imprinting thing on her brood,

where they would accept my company without being disturbed.

I thought that would be a new and interesting perspective.

Eventually, Sweet Pea didn't show up one day.

I thought, "She's hatched her babies."

Eventually, I thought, "Well, I'll go and inspect her nest site."

I went there and immediately saw feathers.

I realised that, Sweet Pea, had in fact been killed on the nest

and eggs were crushed and destroyed and partially eaten.

It was a very disturbing moment, heart breaking.

It made me realise how deep my involvement was with these birds.

But when everyone left, Turkey Boy was the one who eventually came back.

And once he did, he never wanted to leave.

And so we developed an incredible companionship.

It was clear I was no longer this wild turkey's parent.

We had actually become brothers.

I've spent a lifetime studying wild animals,

bears, primates.

I don't think I've ever had a close communication,

with an animal like I had with Turkey Boy.

It was truly phenomenal.

I recognised this and spent every available minute

I could with him, because I felt like it was such a rare opportunity.

The depth of our relationship and the extraordinary communication we had,

and yet Turkey Boy had the ability to convey to me

very specific meanings about what he wanted to do, what he expected from me,

where he wanted to go, how he wanted to spend his day.

The communication was very complete,

it's pretty remarkable with a man and a bird.

Unlike anything I'd ever experienced.

Of course it was inevitable that all this was going to end.

Turkey brothers stay together.

But as a human, of course, I had to return to my own species.

But nothing could have prepared me for the ferocity of what came next.

I happened to look up and Turkey Boy's face was right next to my face.

He was just glowing with these vivid colours of purple and red and blue.

And he had a fierce look in his eye, predatory look.

I thought that was strange.

I reached out my hand and he pecked it at the back of my hand and actually drew blood.

I didn't hit him, I just pushed him back,

with my hand on his breast, "Get back!"

And that was the trigger.

Suddenly he understood what our relationship should truly be as brothers.

And he immediately attacked me.

And he jumped up and he spurred me in the back,

and gouged me, really hurt me.

He jumped up at my face, which is really dangerous,

they can blind you with their big pointed spurs.

I was bleeding, my ear was bleeding, the back of my hands were bleeding.

So I jumped back up, I grabbed this branch and I swung as hard as I could...

..hitting Turkey Boy on the side of the head which literally knocked him down.

He got up, he turned around and he ran out of sight,

as fast as he could run.

And that was the last time I saw Turkey Boy.

For weeks and months, I'd go out into our old area.

I'd go there and sit for hours sometimes,

fully expecting for someone to walk in, a familiar face.

And, uh, no-one ever came.

In fact, their absence seemed to change the ecology entirely.

The rattlesnakes seemed to disappear.

I realised that the turkeys had afforded me this privileged experience,

this insight into their world that had finally closed its doors to me.

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