This coming Thursday is Thanksgiving Day and if you are anything like me, then you spent this past weekend preparing. With guests on the way there are many chores that need to be done including setting up spare bedrooms with fresh linens and clean towels, mopping floors, finding and organizing all the pots and pans that will be needed for the big dinner, bringing in firewood and shopping for food.
It’s the double-edged sword of hosting, right? You don’t have to travel, but you have to do all the work.
But for me, the preparations for Thanksgiving start much, much earlier that just the weekend prior. As a wildlife photographer I am always on the lookout for photos that can be used for future occasions and, at least in my experience, Thanksgiving has always been the greatest challenge. This is because the wild turkey (Meleagrisgallopavo) is such an iconic symbol of the holiday and it has also been a diabolically difficult bird for me to get photos of.
I find this difficulty to be particularly frustrating since wild turkeys are now so wonderfully common in the Northeast. At one point they had been largely extirpated from the region and they were not seen at all. This put them into the same category with other animals like common ravens, coyotes, black bears and moose; all historically present in New England, but all largely wiped out by European colonists. But in my own lifetime I was able to see the return of all of these species and I was able to experience the excitement of observing “ghost” animals that had somehow been resurrected from the dead.
Today you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a wild turkey and I consider myself to be extremely fortunate that I live near open fields in which my neighborhood turkeys perform their courtship displays, which include a wonderful excess of “gobbling” in the springtime.
But the major portion of my observation of turkeys is by sound. Turkeys generally don’t like people getting close to them and this is quite reasonable because many of the people that might want to get close to them are often carrying shotguns.
Thus, you can see large flocks of turkeys displaying in fields next to roads and as long as you keep driving they remain unfazed. Stop the car, however, and everyone comes to attention and starts to prudently move away. Moving cars, after all, aren’t “people” and I don’t think that turkeys understand that the cars have people inside them. Cars are just odd “animals” that travel on well-worn game trails (i.e., roads) at ridiculously high speeds.
As a result of this car-human disconnect in the minds of animals, I have had some measure of luck using my car as a photography blind. It doesn’t always work, but it all came together nicely while I was out on Martha’s Vineyard this summer. It was Sunday, Aug. 22 and Hurricane Henri had ruined all of my plans. I was supposed to leave the island on a ferry that afternoon, but all ferry service had been canceled and I was stranded.
Susan had managed to escape the island before the storm arrived, but her epic “planes, trains and automobiles” journey might have produced more trauma for her than I experienced as a result of being left behind. That’s because my not-quite-so-epic saga included bonus days on Martha’s Vineyard while I waited for a ferry slot to open up. And what does one do when one finds one’s self stranded on an island with nothing to do? Nature photography!
Aug. 22 was the day after the storm hit the Vineyard. Everything was closed and the weather was foggy and windy, but I thought I knew where I might find a flock of turkeys. My trip to the airport the previous day had brought me past an open area where turkeys were congregating and I bet myself a dollar that they would be there again. So, off to the airport I went and there they were. A flock of birds with several large adult males, known as “Toms.” These guys really stood out of the crowd because each had a decorative feather (called a “beard”) that hung down from the crop.
The light was diffuse and their were waves of fog that swept across the lawn, but I was able to slowly roll my car along the abandoned road as the flock of turkeys walked to the north. There were several young-of-the-year birds, several hens and a fairly large number of toms. It was wonderful to see them and listen to the little noises they made toward one another and it only took me a couple hundred photos to manage to get a couple with the birds’ faces in focus. Turkey faces are the challenge of challenges!
So, as you read this column and look at these photos I want you to remember how far ahead of Thanksgiving my preparations began. Long before pies were being baked, or candles were being lit, I was slowly rolling down the abandoned road to the Martha’s Vineyard airport taking photos of a flock of wild turkeys as the remnants of a hurricane brought gusts of wind and waves of fog across an open field. And then I went and had lobster for lunch. Poor me!
Bill Danielson has worked for the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service, and the Massachusetts State Parks. He has been a professional writer and nature photographer for 19 years and also teaches high school biology and physics. For more information, visit: www.speakingofnature.com or go to Speaking of Nature on Facebook.