The turkeys are coming!

There’s a story about turkey commissioners from the Green Ridge flock who held a big committee meeting to look into other ways to explore life. After a lengthy discussion, the commissioners voted that they should all learn to read and fly.

At the culmination of the flying lessons the turkey commissioners were enthralled with the exhilarating vistas viewed from 3,000 feet above the surface; they could see Warm Springs, Prineville, Madras and all the way to Bend.

After landing, they preened their feathers, congratulating each other about their new perspective on life — and then they all walked home. And you can see by Kris Kristovich’s photo above, they didn’t do too well in the reading department either.

Over the past couple of months, I have received numerous phone calls, e-mails, hailings in the Post Office and “Oh, by the ways…” regarding the invasion of turkeys in the Sisters area.

Turkeys are appearing in backyards at Tollgate, on porches at The Hill, in barns, eating Fido’s dog food and competing with juncos and sparrows at bird feeders. One woman told me she watched a turkey leap into the air and snatch the suet-feeder out a tree that she’d set out for woodpeckers. And a while back, Doris Brouillette, who lives on Deerridge Road, called The Nugget office to report she had 22 turkeys in her yard.

Kris Kristovich has them wandering through his place any day of the week. So, what’s going on…? Turkeys are beginning to be as numerous, and obnoxious as starlings…

Over the past few years, turkey biologists from the High Desert Regional office of The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) have released hundreds of so-called “wild” turkeys over in the Ochocos, but I doubt if they wandered this far afield.

The turkeys ODFW scattered around the Ochocos were problem birds captured over in the Medford/Roseburg areas where they were messing up feed lots and causing other agricultural damages. It makes one wonder about the turkey’s so-called “wildness” designation if they were pigging out in feed lots and digging up people’s gardens.

Therefore, based on the apparent rise in turkeys around here, I thought perhaps we may also have been the recipients of a few of these feed-lot turkeys. But according to Clair Kunkle, ODFW wildlife biologist in this region, no turkeys have been released around Sisters since the original introduction several years ago. Therefore, I guess that makes them “wild.”

Clair suggested two good reasons why we are seeing more turkeys in these past few months:

1. “We’ve had relatively mild winters, and decent conditions for turkey reproduction the past few years, so turkey numbers and distribution have increased accordingly. We see the effects of this in other locations as well, such as our White River Wildlife area, and some locations in Jefferson, Wasco, Hood, and Crook counties.”

2. “I wonder if some folks in your area might be feeding wild turkeys? I know in some other rural/residential areas, people have taken to feeding the birds, resulting in residential populations.”

I’ll bet we’re back into the wildlife-feeding thing again. People complain bitterly about hunters encroaching on their property, but what else can they do if the “game” is being fed and hangs around everyone’s backyard?

If the mild winters continue, turkeys will persist to beget more turkeys. The aim of ODFW efforts in putting them all over this part of Central Oregon is for turkey hunters to kill them, not for people to feed them. It appears we are having a “management problem” here — these birds are to be (officially) harvested, not (unofficially) mollycoddled.

If we keep feeding all the wildlife around us we’ll have wolves moving in from Idaho, grizzly bears from Yellowstone, moose from Montana and this place will turn into Disneyland.