Bea and Harriet and I love driving by a particular house on River Road—it’s a mobile home on a small hill planted with trees and flowers, next to a pond. What’s great about this house is that the owner has SO MANY birds. Chickens, geese, ducks, and sometimes guinea fowl. It’s always a different scene when we pass by—all the geese gathered under a tree on a hot day, the ducks and geese swimming in the pond, the fluffy chickens strutting around.
This week I convinced Bea to go on a run with me, with the goal of making it to this house, about two miles from us. Bea doesn’t love running as much as I do, so having a goal destination makes a difference. But we didn’t even have to go that far to see impressive fowl. On the way we spotted two long necked-birds with fat bodies, brownish-black feathers and bright red wattles. Wild turkeys! We watched them a while as they strutted around a field, pecking at the ground and gobbling. We couldn’t get close—they were on the other side of a fence, next to the treeline, but it occurred to us that we haven’t really posted much about animals lately.
It turns out wild turkeys are pretty fascinating!
-You probably know that Benjamin Franklin thought the wild turkey, which unlike the bald eagle doesn’t scavenge meat or steal from other birds, was a “more respectable bird,” a “bird of courage,” and would have made a better national bird! (We happen to love bald eagles, but he makes a good point.)
-Turkeys are omnivorous foragers who eat leaves, grass, seeds, berries, insects, snails, and frogs.
-North American wild turkeys are the largest game bird in the world, weighing between 15 and 25 pounds (for males). They are social and intelligent, and make more than 20 different vocalizations to communicate with their peers, including the “assembly call” made by hens to collect her young, the “cluck and purr” of a contented flock, the “fly down and fly up cackle” of turkeys leaving or approaching the roost, and of course the gobble, which males use to attract mates.
-Domestic turkeys were bred by Indigenous people in what is now Mexico, Central America, and the Southwestern US as far back as 800 BC.
-Wild turkeys and domestic turkeys are pretty much the same bird, genetically, but domestic turkeys have been bred to have white feathers (for gross reasons you don’t want to know about). Wild turkeys have the handsome dark feathers we associate with turkeys.
-A group of turkeys is called a “gang.”
-Wild turkeys see three times better than humans. But they don’t see well at night, so to stay safe from predators they roost at night in trees.
-Wait, turkeys can fly? Yes they can—up to 55 miles an hour, but only for short distances. They can also run up to 12 miles an hour, which is definitely faster than me.
-Big Bird’s costume is made of turkey feathers, dyed yellow! The costume has some 6,000 tail feathers and weighs fifteen pounds.
-Turkey heads are also known as “nature’s mood ring,” changing color from blue to white to read, depending on how excited or agitated the bird is.
-Wild turkeys are also considered one of our greatest conservation success stories. Due to habitat destruction, deforestation, and unregulated hunting, they might have gone extinct. Thanks to hunting laws, the establishment of protected areas, and the efforts of conservationists like Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell, wild turkeys populations grew from only 30,000 in the nineteenth century to more than 300,000 in the 1950s. Today, wild turkeys are a species of least concern.
Of great concern to us right now is the proliferation of jive turkeys in our beleaguered state of North Carolina. Unlike the handsome and honorable wild turkey, jive turkey is 1970s African American slang for an “insincere, deceitful, dishonest person.”
Jive turkeys abound in our legislature. Tricia Cotham, elected as a Democrat, but flattered into becoming a Republican in order to reestablish the Republican supermajority, is a jive turkey. Her deceitful and shameful abandonment of principle means we now have a 12-week abortion ban (alongside one of the longest and most restrictive waiting periods in the country), something she once argued against, because Republicans have just enough votes to override Governor Cooper’s vetoes.
This week, Tricia Cotham’s fellow Republicans plan to vote to give even more of our tax money—$463.5 million—to school vouchers, further defunding our public schools. Vouchers can go to any family, regardless of wealth, and are primarily applied to shoddy, often discriminatory, unregulated religious schools. A family of four earning $259,000 a year can get a gift of $4,480. There is no limit on how much you can earn and still receive the voucher.
Republicans in the legislature are choosing to waste this money rather than supporting NC Pre-K, a program that is successful, important, beneficial to all families, and which, because of underfunding, is unavailable to 24,000 low-income kids. They’re choosing to pay for rich folks to send their kids to private school rather than give our excellent public school teachers, bus drivers, and staff the raises they deserve. Many of these people already afford private school just fine, and have never had their kids in public schools.
What can you do to stop these jive turkeys?
Maybe not much—they’re pretty dug in on their evil plans. But that doesn’t mean we don’t speak up! You can sign this petition from Public Schools First. You can call or email your NC state senator, strongly urging them to oppose private school voucher expansion. Senators vote Monday.
If you want to learn more about how school vouchers harm our kids and waste our money, please watch this great video from Public Schools First NC:
Time for one more jive turkey? He’s not from NC, but Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is definitely a foolish liar who is messing with our state. Back in July and August, he desperately wanted his We the People party on our ballots. The Republican courts obliged. Now that he has endorsed Trump—at a Friday rally in Charlotte, Trump boasted “all of the Bobby people are going to vote for me”—he wants off again.
The problem is, the absentee ballots have been printed, a cost that is borne by the counties. Absentee ballots should have been mailed—were required by law to have been mailed—on Friday. But they weren’t, because an Appeals Court panel says that a fickle weirdo’s rights (which he cares about only in swing states) matter more than ours.
The best thing we can do in response to this appalling decision is get out the vote in North Carolina. Make calls, reach out to your undecided or low-turnout friends and family, or sign up for a high-impact canvass event (training provided).
The stakes are high! Do you really want this anti-vaccine megalomaniac as our Health and Human Services secretary?
How about you, Frog Troublers? Have you had enough of these jive turkeys?