Saturday, November 24, 2007

I'm not in a rural area at all...

So I don't understand why my parents' back yard has become a wildlife habitat preserve. But, it has:

Ok, squirrels, cats, the odd gopher, BFD, I hear you saying. But it is a little more unusual to be adopted by a flock of wild turkeys, especially considering we live so close to the freeway and multi-lane streets:

If I had access to my Photoshop right now I could crop and zoom a bit better for you. I had to run get my camera so the turkey family had time to scuttle to the other end of the yard, and then hide. When I drove up to my parents' house the other evening, there were 30 or so of them roosting on the pointy roof of the main living room. This is a pretty regular occurrence, though only these three seem to have adopted our backyard as a permanent home.

We've been making bad turkey jokes like "a turkey on both your houses" for a while now ... unfortunately if we didn't have opportunities to make bad puns we would invent them, so there's no hope for us. These turkeys must know that we're too suburban as a family to ever bother catching and eating them ourselves, and since my dad hates pets we're probably the only place on the block without a dog to shoo them from the yard.
Anyways, happy holidays from my house, where every day, evidently, is turkey day.

3 comments:

Earnest English said...

Okay, Sisyphus, I was in a deeply hateful bad place, but now I'm charmed. Those birds are cool.

(I also never thought I'd be so happy to see grass and suburbia and a nice place to sit. It looks so much like my folks place. In fact -- are we related??? Look at that -- grass and sun and everything -- in November. Ahhh. As it was meant to be. We'll have to meet up.)

undine said...

Well, seeing wild turkeys *is* exciting, and it's nice that they are semi-regulars in your parents' yard. At least they don't get all territorial and try to shoo you out of the yard, as geese would.

Sisyphus said...

ee, though my parents live in CA, they have never mentally left the Midwest. If your parents are from there, I could see some commonalities.

Undine, they don't appear to crap all over the yard, like the geese at our local public park do, either. So it's all good!