Turkeys and Chickens as Guard Animals?
JUST WHEN WE THOUGHT WE HAD OUR TURKEYS FIGURED OUT, we had yet another new experience with our Midget Whites early one fall morning. Around 9:30, I was in the living room, about to indulge in a cup of Earl Grey tea and my uncontrollable daily writing habit. David had gone upstairs to take a short nap. It is usually fairly quiet at this time of day.
After just a few minutes, the turkeys started making noise in the front yard. Most of the flock of nineteen was out there, and they were making that particular noise that we’ve come to recognize as their warning that a predator was on the ground nearby. (Usually when we’ve heard this sound and checked it out, it turned out to be deer. The turkeys make a very different noise when an aerial predator is overhead.) I stood up, looked out the window and could see the flock on high alert, standing still with necks all stretched upward in the same direction, loudly sounding the alarm. I figured there were deer on the other side of the split-rail fence, munching on vetch; lately we’ve seen a doe and her two tiny fawns frequently in that area.
I opened the front door to get a better look. Since David was trying to sleep, I was hoping to get the turkeys to quiet down. I couldn’t believe what I saw: a good-sized black bear, just at the north end of the front yard, about sixty feet from where I stood. It was walking right up into the yard, and all the turkeys were just standing there, squawking loudly, making no move to get away.
After calling up to David, I grabbed my camera and headed quickly upstairs to a better vantage point for photographing the bear before it left the yard. The bear, hearing me yelling to David, turned away and headed back toward the road and the edge of the canyon. I was just in time to get one decent photo before it disappeared into the trees by the edge of the canyon. By then the turkeys were beginning to calm down.
I, on the other hand, was having a bit of an adrenaline rush. This was only the third time I have actually seen a bear up here; the other times one had been down by the pond, a couple of hundred yards from the house. Our property is bordered almost entirely by State land, with our nearest neighbor two miles down the hill, so naturally we have lots of wildlife around. It was very surprising to see a bear so close to the house, especially in the middle of the morning.
Rooster Talk: Predator Alert or Photo Op?
The other day, David and I ran outside when we heard an aerial-predator alarm from our roosters. I don’t know how to describe this exactly, but we’ve started to discern some subtle differences in this kind of alert. This time, our first reaction was that it must be a big bird coming in low overhead. Sure enough, we got outside just in time to see a pair of golden eagles cruising low overhead, the first one wasn’t much more than 50 feet up, certainly close enough to shake up the birds.
They were enormous, amazing, beautiful birds, and it was the first time we’ve seen golden eagles here, although lots of bald eagles have been around in the past year. Silly me, I had run outside without my video camera. David said to me later that, for birders like us, the roosters’ alarm calls can be helpful in letting us know not just that there’s a potential predator in the vicinity, but there might be a rare opportunity to see something like a golden eagle. They usually are higher up in the mountains than our farm’s elevation of a thousand feet.
As I said, there seem to be some variations in the aerial-predator call. I’m going to try to record these someday. In the meantime, I must remember to grab my camera next time I hear our helpful little roosters give the heads-up.
It seems to me that it wasn’t until recently that we became aware of the turkeys’ excellent early-warning systems. We were familiar with the roosters calling out to the hens when an aerial predator was about, warning them to get under cover (an amazing sight to witness), but the turkeys are very consistent in letting us know when a visitor arrives on foot. We’ve even seen the turkeys chasing deer and wild ducks out of the yard! How they distinguish between our ducks and the wild ones I don’t know, but apparently they do.
As we head deeper into the autumn, and the food sources so plentiful in summer become less abundant, we will be keeping our eyes open for hungry predators who show interest in our birds. And we’re very grateful for the efforts of the turkeys to help in that process.