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Birds and Nature, Vol. XI, No 5, May 1902

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<h2 id="c4">THE GOBBLER WHO WAS LONESOME. A HISTORICAL FACT.</h2> Turkeys are social creatures and, like some boys and girls, do not like to be left for any length of time to find their food or their pleasures alone. Big Tom was a mammoth gobbler of the bronze family, which stands high in Turkeydom. Big Tom loved to have a group of admiring mates and social equals about when he spread his jaw and sang his song. Some taller bipeds who spoke a different language said that his song of “gobble-obble-obble” was not pleasing. This remark may have been the reason why Big Tom’s wattles grew so scarlet each time he sang, but it is to be doubted. When the spring days had grown long three hen turkeys came off their nests with broods of turkey chicks, too valuable to the farmer to be left entirely to the turkey mother’s judgment and care. Hence these various broods, numbering in all twenty-seven chicks, were penned into tiny homes and fed on food furnished by their master. Big Tom watched these proceedings for about one week, and then evidently rebelled at the taking of his kingdom away from him. He first persuaded one brood to follow him into a field where grasshoppers bounded and abounded. This brood he kept over night housed under his great wings. His success pleased him, for in a few days a second brood was discovered to be missing, and two hen turkeys were idling away their time talking over their troubles or happiness through the bars of their wooden prisons. But the climax was reached when in a distant field a few days later Big Tom was found chaperoning a party of twenty-seven young tourist turkeys of a very tender age, through a field where insect food was too plentiful for the farmer’s profit, but just right for sturdy bronze turkeys, both young and old. The farmer attempted to drive his majesty, Big Tom, back to his quarters near the barn, but the young turks disappeared at their father’s first warning cluck or signal, and Big Tom showed plainly that he resented interference with his own plans for his children’s future. The farmer returned to the house alone and finding the three turkey hens calmly gossiping through the slatted fronts of their coops, gave them their liberty, and went back to planting his crop in the distant field, where he found Big Tom happy with his party of young adventurers. Big Tom never allowed one turkey chick to return night or day to its coop or its mother. In the fall, the farmer and his boys counted twenty-seven well grown turkeys perched on the fence back of the barn, with his majesty, their father, half way down the line, where his eyes could take in all their doings. The hen turkeys had gone about their own work, raised other broods and brought them up in coops with various losses, but Big Tom of the red wattles has always been celebrated in that locality from that year down to the present date as the best manager of a turkey ranch ever known. At Thanksgiving time Big Tom’s good qualities were enumerated by a large party gathered at the farmer’s table, and if his majesty could have heard the flattering remarks his pride would have perhaps caused him to give back an answering “gobble-obble-obble.” Mary Catherine Judd. <div class="fig"><ANTIMG src="images/i11501.jpg" alt="" width-obs="500" height-obs="656" /> VARIED THRUSH. (Hesperocichla naevia.) About ½ Life-size. FROM COL. CHI. ACAD. SCIENCES. </div> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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