Hi fellow Hiveians,
Today I wanted to chat a little bit about the interesting turkey encounter we had!
The little man and I were out recently fishing when we randomly had a very close encounter with a turkey!
Turkeys are something that we see quite often where we live, as they are one of the most popular wild birds in the United States. Not only because they are delicious, but they are interesting creates that can sometimes have quite an attitude on them! Lol. This turkey wasn't one of those ones with an attitude! I guess it's probably because it's not getting closer to winter, this guy is interesting in getting some weight on!
The turkey was acting pretty strange though when we were out there. It was digging it's body in the sand and throwing sand from it's beak onto it's feathers and back. I am wondering if it was trying to take a dry bath or not. It was pretty cool to see! After doing some research while writing this, it turns out that the turkey was doing a dust bath, which makes sense! source.
This was a female turkey which I already knew. The male ones are the ones with all the fancy stuff like the big feathers and the ballsack under their neck. Those are the ones that we see making a ruckus but the would-be momma here was spending some time taking care of her feathers and her skin. The dust bath helps get rid of bugs and I think the sand here is a perfect thing for the bird to use. It was filling its feathers up with all kinds of sand and she would walk over to the water and shake it out. It was really interesting to see that! She did it twice. I guess the birds do this routinely. They go for a dust bath to get rid of the nasty stuff then go back into the woods to hunt for food!
We got another good shock as well! I've never seen a turkey fly up onto anything. They are always walking on the ground when I see them, or running across a road in a pack. This one jumped from the ground up into the air! I've heard that turkeys sleep in tree branches. I don't know exactly if that's true but I think it makes sense. They don't have a "nest" that many other birds do, so they have to get up off the ground somehow so they get away from the predators like coyotes and stuff. Speaking of which, I am curious if they do build some type of nest up off the ground, otherwise how do they keep the chicks away from the predators? I'll now have to go look it up lol.
She got up to the top post of the canoe storage structure and she started pruning her feathers, doing all kinds of stuff to spread them out and keep em nice and clean. Before she hopped up, she did one last sand bath and jumped on up. She gave it a good shake and threw sand everywhere which was funny. Then she went to town! I think she was hanging out there cleaning her feathers for a good 6 or 7 minutes before she stopped and hopped on down to walk away in search of food haha.
The coolest part of it all was how close she got to us! The little man and I have seen quite a number of turkeys in our days together but we always see them from a pretty good distance away, 100 feet or more at least. This time though, the turkey here wasn't really afraid of us at all! She didn't come walking over towards us on the dock of course but she got within 15 feet of us which was really cool. Being that close to the turkey was definitely new for me! The little man certainly enjoyed it, he's fascinated by all the different animals and has always really enjoyed seeing turkeys.
-CmplXty. Real human written content, never AI.
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