The Case of the Missing Turkeys

Ever since I have been fortunate enough to appear in the Sports pages of this fine newspaper, I have written about fishing. There’s more to the outdoors, like hunting and nature and conservation, and I hope to get into all of those subjects as time passes.

I have a tale I’d like to tell you about and I am going to call it, “The Case of the Missing Turkeys.” Turkey hunting is growing in popularity by leaps and bounds. There is a spring turkey season and one in the fall. I’ve hunted turkeys and the attraction is magical. These birds are difficult to bag. It’s embarrassing to say that I’ve been outsmarted by a bird with a brain the size of a kernel of corn, but it happens. They are wily creatures.

Popular thought says that gobblers are unable to fly, but that is untrue. Turkeys are uniquely colored and I find them to be quite beautiful. They almost look like they are dinosaurs. They look rather strange.

It’s funny, but I have always had an interest in these strange looking creatures. I am pretty sure that very few people have seen wild turkeys up close and personal. A number of years ago, I hosted a weekly television show on CLTV, the sister station of WGN.

I was getting ready for airtime in the green room. My show was going to talk about taxidermy that week, and I had brought with me a beautiful mounted wild turkey. I had it sitting on a table and covered with a tarp. The other guests that evening on the sports segment of the show were men’s basketball players from the University of Illinois at Chicago accompanied by coach Jimmy Collins.

The players were entering the green room just as I was pulling the tarp off the wild turkey mount. The players had never seen a turkey, except on a dinner plate. They all freaked out trying to stay away from the bird that they didn’t know was stuffed and mounted. They acted like they were being attacked by the creature form the movie “Alien.”

Collins couldn’t control his laughter. He helped me calm his young men down and explain what turkeys were all about.

I’ve mentioned I live in the Western suburbs and have written about the large numbers of animals I see in my area. Eight years ago, I volunteered to work as a marshal for a 5K race to benefit the Northern Illinois Food Bank. The race was held at Cantigny in Wheaton.

I wasn’t on the course long when I first noticed a pair of wild turkeys on the runners’ path walking toward me. I was astounded. I’d never seen wild turkeys up close and personal before. They were strutting around very brazenly like they knew they were safe and had nothing to fear.

I asked a couple of the marshals on the course what the deal was with the turkeys, and I was told that a large herd of turkeys lived at Cantigny and they had been exposed to the public so often that the birds behaved as if they were domesticated. You couldn’t get close enough to touch them, but they certainly weren’t afraid of humans.

Soon after, I was driving on a residential street in the Adare Farms neighborhood a block off busy Roosevelt Road. Traffic was stopped on the side street I was on in both directions. The cars were stopped because the street was congested with wild turkeys. I counted eight birds blocking traffic. They were strutting and gobbling and had no mind for traffic and the horns that were being honked at them. The birds seemed to enjoy walking up to the cars and pecking at the vehicles with their sharp beaks.

I’ll continue with “The Case of the Missing Turkeys” next week.

• Daily Herald Outdoors columnist Steve Sarley can be reached at sarfishing@yahoo.com.