In honor of this week being Thanksgiving, I thought it was only fitting to write a special post about our turkeys.

Our Bourbon Red turkeys are fascinating birds; big, beautiful, entertaining, but sadly, not very bright.  

That is not to say that they will stand in the rain looking up and drowning, this is, I believe, an old wive’s tale, but when God was handing out the smarts, they were definately not at the front of the line.

Take this past week for instance. 

We currently have two full grown Toms that weigh about 20 pounds each.   They recently re-grew all of their feathers and are looking their best for the ladies.

Both the boys were hatched at the same time a few years ago and have been together ever since with really no issues between them. 

However,  this past week, one of them got stuck in the chicken yard and couldn’t figure out how to get out (the chickens have no problems finding the open gate)!  He spent several hours pacing back and forth on the fence line making quite a racket.  The other Tom was on the outside of the yard also pacing back and forth, mirroring the stuck Tom…don’t ask me why, I can’t explain what goes on in their little brains.  

When I finally chased the stuck turkey out, he and the other Tom decided to get in to it.  Seemed to me to be a fight to determine the pecking order (pun intended) between the two of them, but it could have just one telling the other one how dumb he was.

Fighting includes grabbing the loose skin of the other turkey, which they have in abundance, sometimes trying to take the opponent’s entire head in to their mouth, twining their necks around each other to bring the other one to the ground and basically intimidating the other male in to giving up and going away. 

The second turkey in the pic may look like he is in bad shape, but he actually was fine, just a little bloodied.

Snoods fly this way and that during the fighting, becoming bloodied and swollen and unable to be retracted which is apparently very annoying as the male will start swinging his snood this way and that to get it out of his face. 

What is a snood, you may ask?

No, it is not what the lovely Ginger Rogers is wearing in her hair, and goodness knows why a hair snood is named for a turkey snood. 

The turkey snood is an erectile fleshy protuberance above the beak, which can be retracted so it sticks up like a small fleshy horn, or it can be relaxed so that it hangs down. I have read in some places that the length of a turkey’s snood may be directly related to his virility…I kid you not, I could not make this stuff up.

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