One day at dusk in Cedar Knolls, New Jersey, eleven turkeys came to the edge of a wood. A housing subdivision had been gouged out of the wood, but in there, among the trees, grasses and reeds, the animals still crouch, creep, crawl, gambol, flutter and step into and out of the bushes that rim the buildings. I have seen turkeys there before, but I did not see these eleven.
Cedar Knolls is the town where my first two grandchildren live. And, not, coincidentally, where their parents’ live. When I visit, I stand at a window in their second-floor apartment and watch the grayish/brown deer materialize from the trees to graze at the edge of the wood, the groundhogs galump along the berm and the wild turkeys, some as tall as a 9-year-old child, that strut boldly across the grass and onto the pavement. I have no such abundance of wildlife in my neighborhood, despite the occasional warnings about the odd coyote.
“Lisa! I think they’re trying to teach them to fly!” my son-in-love called out to my daughter. Lisa tends to anthropomorphize the behaviors of the beasts from the wood. She has described for me the deer (party of four) that came toward the clearing and settled down at the edge, within the wood. “One deer wandered out onto the mowed section, as if to say, ‘See? It’s safe! Nothing happened.’ And it danced in the open, like it was inviting its brothers out.” And she told me about the day of the turkeys, when she and Bing and my grandbeauties, Xavion and Imani, gathered at the window to watch them. When he was taking me to the airport, at dawn last January, Bing told me again, about the turkeys that day. “It was one of the most amazing things that I have seen.”
Despite the myth promulgated by the old TV series, “WKRP In Cincinnati,” turkeys can fly. In the unlikely event that they might be launched from a helicopter, as they were in a famous skit, they are not going to end up “hitting the ground like sacks of wet cement.” They roost in trees at night, the same trees that the three adult turkeys were trying to get the eight fledglings to fly into. Two adults led the youngsters to the top of the berm; one adult hung back, to peck encouragement to a straggler. When they were all gathered on the hill, an adult took off, and flew into a tree. “The baby turkeys were like, ‘yeah, that looks good, but no thanks,’ and they stayed on the hill,” Lisa told me. But the adults pecked and nudged them, and one by one they flew into the trees, until there was one adult and one fledgling left.
When I called Lisa to confirm some of the details of this memory, she said, “Oh, my goodness: Xavion (my grandson) just asked me, ‘Mom; do you remember when we watched the turkeys learning to fly?’ ” And on that evening, the last adult, nudged, pecked and encouraged the last fledgling, who hung back, dancing nervously atop the berm. The adult flew into the trees, and the fledgling, left alone, took some careful steps and launched itself into the trees.
My grandson remembered that moment, at least a year later, and though he may not be able to articulate it, I believe that the experience added to the many observations of life that have formed his gentle soul. And when my granddaughter paused with me in the wood, to watch a fawn being met by its mother, she learned patience, and saw caring, some of the same things we garner from watching the life of turkeys.