A Turkey Afternoon Delight

Yesterday afternoon, when we weren't looking, a couple of Turkeys were getting very excited in the staging area in front of the trail camera.

Read these photos from the bottom up. In the first three, Tom takes the stage at 2:50 p.m. In the second three, Sally seems to be following him about two minutes later. In the third three, Tom returns to the center of the stage to begin inflating himself, hoping that Sally is watching. This is four minutes after Sally walked by. Then they're both off-stage for five minutes, during which time Tom has continued to blow himself up, displaying ever more of his ornamental plumage. When he takes the stage again, as the final three show, he has pushed all his chips into the pot, going for broke, showing everything he's got. He's been warming up to this full appeal for sex for 11 minutes now. Is Sally persuaded that she wants to have Tom's babies? Should she be honored that Tom's ardor is so worked up for her? Or is Tom only looking for a weekend fling? The result occurred off-camera, but I'm hoping Sally "did the right thing."

Audubon's bird biography on the Wild Turkey, which he watched for an almost legendary number of hours in the wild, represents Tom as having sex because it's fun, not just to propagate the species. So Sally might be right to be suspicious. Here's what Audubon published in 1831:

When a male and a female have thus come together, I believe the connexion continues for that season, although the former by no means confines his attentions to one female, as I have seen a cock caress several hens, when he happened to fall in with them in the same place, for the first time. After this the hens follow their favourite cock, roosting in his immediate neighbourhood, if not on the same tree, until they begin to lay, when they separate themselves, in order to save their eggs from the male, who would break them all, for the purpose of protracting his sexual enjoyments. The females then carefully avoid him, excepting during a short period each day.

I suspect that an evolutionary biologist would have a different explanation for a Tom's destroying a clutch of eggs, but that wouldn't make so horny a tale.