Know a Recipe?

Two days ago I replaced our humming bird feeder with a suet feeder. The humming birds probably picked out their feeding locations before we set up our feeder. We set the suet in a suet holder and hung it from our six foot high pole --which was firmly set in the ground.

That night it poured and in the morning the pole and suet feeder no longer stood upright.

"Must have been quite windy last night."

I went outside to right the pole and feeder when I discovered that the pole had not been blown over. The bottom of the pole was bent--wrenched out of its normal shape. A right turn about two feet high created an unusable pole.

Instead of a full slab of suet, 80% was gone--disappeared. All my mystery reading didn't translate into a logical explanation. Perhaps, I thought, the rain pounded so hard that the suet dissolved. Perhaps one of our many wild turkeys wrested the pole from its place and threw it to the earth.

Today the mystery unraveled to reveal the true story. Six adolescent sized wild turkeys, along with their mother, spent fifteen minutes scratching around the area where the suet fell down-- or was pulled down. They pecked away at the ground probably finding tiny specks of suet. Their mother hung out without taking part in an afternoon of frolicking and eating.

Once upon a time the wild turkey population was almost depleted in some areas of New England. They were reintroduced and conservation experts consider their efforts a total success. Today millions of wild turkeys roam-- the backwoods, suburbia and even urban areas.

How about this statistic --gleaned from a NPR article. In the early 1900s "there were only about 30,000 wild turkeys left in the whole country."

" Today, there are nearly 7 million wild turkeys."

Zealots.