Reconnect With Nature Blog

Lessons from a Turkey

This is a post from Guest Author Randall Johnson, who has contributed a number of guest posts and comments to this blog.

A few weeks ago, I came across a news item that got me thinking about the extremes our current level of separation from the natural world can sometimes carry us.

It seems a small town in Massachusetts acquired an unofficial mascot a few months ago in the form of a wild turkey, which the townspeople named ‘Freddy’. He strutted around town freely, visiting local businesses, going in and out of stores, and getting hand-outs along the way. He became something of a local celebrity, having attracting local media attention through his ‘friendly’ behavior.

However, in early August, the local police found it necessary to apprehend and euthanize Freddy after he was declared a public safety hazard for having attacked motorcyclists and passersby. Afterwards, the town held a memorial service for its beloved bird, with mourners leaving flowers and notes. One resident even set up a Facebook page in Freddy’s honor with over 1,500 friends and counting.

What the townspeople may not have known is wild turkeys can be aggressive when they lose their fear of people and, after several months of urban living, Freddy had become pretty much fearless. As such, he wasn’t an ideal candidate for relocation, as was pointed out by local wildlife officials.

Now, there was nothing unusual or out-of-the-ordinary about Freddy’s behavior, considering he’d become habituated to humans and vehicular traffic. However, the fact that some of the town’s citizens organized and participated in a memorial service for him gave me pause for reflection. It struck me that the energy and emotion that went into this act of mourning was disproportionate to the situation.

Granted, wild turkeys are the official game bird of Massachusetts.

Granted, by 1851, they had been wiped out from the state as a result of hunting.

However, in 1972-1973, the state Division of Fisheries and Wildlife launched a successful reintroduction program, starting with 37 turkeys. Today, the turkey population in Massachusetts is somewhere between 20,000-25,000!

So, they’re not threatened with imminent extinction, unlike the 16,300 or so plant and animal species that appear on the World Conservation Union’s 2007 Red List of Threatened Species.

Let’s put this into perspective even more.

Wild turkeys grow to be 4 feet tall and weigh around 20 pounds. Not exactly lightweights! Following their reintroduction, they surprised everyone—including wildlife officials—by being adaptable to residential, even urban, living, with thriving populations in Boston and Cambridge. They are opportunistic feeders, eating everything from bird seed to gutter trash, and then depositing large amounts of ‘scat’ all over the place.

Some residents report being happy to see a bit a nature strolling around, whereas others are wary, even afraid, of what these sometimes ornery birds might do, especially when children are around. More than a few people have even reported being terrorized by them, prompting local police to issue guidelines about what to do—and not to do—should people meet a wild turkey on the sidewalk.

It strikes me that reintroduction programs can be a double-edge sword. Yes, Massachusetts got its turkeys back after more than one hundred ‘turkey-less’ years. But now many of the state’s communities have a new public health and safety issue to deal with that the Fisheries and Wildlife biologists hadn’t counted on.

At the individual level, some people’s need for contact with nature leads to maudlin displays of sentimentality that make for good headlines but that’s about all.

There’s no question that we need to exercise a healthy dose of compassion in our treatment of other species. After all, humans are now the leading cause of extinction. But in addition to using our hearts, we also need to use our heads.

 

 

 

RECONNECTING WITH NATURE…THROUGH AESOP’S FABLES?

This is a post from Guest Author Randall Johnson, who has contributed a number of guest posts and comments to this blog.

Reconnecting with nature may take some unexpected twists and turns along the way, but who would have thought Aesop’s Fables would turn out to one of them? That’s right. The ancient Greek story-teller credited with collecting such timeless fables as “The Tortoise and the Hare” and “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”, each with a moral lesson at the end, may also have been a keen observer of bird behavior.

In “The Crow and the Pitcher”, a thirsty crow comes across a pitcher with water at the bottom, beyond the reach of its beak. After failing to push the pitcher over, the crow drops in pebbles, one by one, until the water rises to the top, allowing the bird to drink. (The moral of the story: Necessity is the mother of invention.)

Well, it turns out that this is more than just an old fable. Researchers Christopher Bird of the University of Cambridge and Nathan Emery of Queen Mary University of London have reported in the current issue of Current Biology that rooks, another corvid and a relative of the crow, are able to use stones to raise the level of water in a plastic container to reach a floating worm.

Bird and Emery experimented on four rooks by presenting them with a clear tube partly filled with water and a worm floating on top, and a nearby pile of stones of varying sizes. The birds spontaneously dropped stones into the water and seemed to estimate how many stones would be needed. They also quickly learned bigger stones worked better than smaller ones.

Although some species of crows have been proven to use tools in the wild, rooks do not. They don’t have to as they have easy access to food, like carrion. But in an experimental situation like this one, they easily figured out how to use the stones to reach the worm.

Says Mr. Bird, “It was a remarkable combination of some understanding of the task with really rapid learning.”  In the summary of their published paper, Bird and Emery state, “This behavior demonstrates a flexible ability to use tools, a finding with implications for the evolution of tool use and cognition in animals.”

The more we take time to watch animals, the better we see how much we share in common with them, including brain power, and how this common thread firmly and solidly connects us to the natural world that supports us all.

Now, I seem to recall Aesop also told a story about the goose that laid golden eggs. Well, if such a fabled fowl should also exist and find its way to my door, that’s one story you won’t read about in Current Biology. I’ll keep that one all to myself.