The Mental (and Amorous) Qualities of the Wild Turkey

Well, Book Benchers, today marks the end of the pre-holiday season; also of the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of “On the Origin of Species”; and of the Book Bench’s blogging week. How to celebrate such an insignificant day? Why not with a look at Darwin’s writings on our favorite pre-football snack. His 1871 “The Descent of Man, and Selection Relating to Sex” includes a wonderful little chapter called “Mental Qualities of Birds, and their Taste for the Beautiful,” which addresses the question of whether female birds hold out for the hottest males, or just settle for the first guy who waddles by, however dingy his tail feathers. To answer the question, Darwin writes, it’s necessary to consider whether the lady birds know what they are doing when they gobble gobble in a special someone’s direction. Birds are generally thought of as birdbrained, he writes:

Yet some facts could be given leading to an opposite conclusion. Low powers of reasoning, however, are compatible, as we see with mankind, with strong affections, acute perception, and a taste for the beautiful.

In other words, if even stupid humans know what looks good, why can’t stupid birds?

But back to turkeys. Darwin goes on to praise aspects of birds’ intelligence, including their “acute powers of observation,” demonstrated, he’s heard, by the wild turkey:

Audubon relates that he reared and tamed a wild turkey which always ran away from any strange dog: this bird escaped into the woods, and some days afterwards Audubon saw, as he thought, a wild turkey, and made his dog chase it; but, to his astonishment, the bird did not run away, and the dog, when he came up, did not attack the bird, for they mutually recognised each other as old friends.

John James Audubon, like his dog, had a soft spot for the wild turkey: it served as the subject of the first plate in “Birds of America,” and the long essay accompanying it speaks to their intimate (and occasionally murderous) relationship; the minuteness of the observation is, in fact, breathtaking. Audubon notes the buds of the spicewood bush that the new mother turkey lays over her young when it’s raining (“if once completely wetted, the young seldom recover”); how he has seen some hens during strawberry season grown “so fat as to burst open on falling from a tree when shot”; and revels in the violence of the mating ritual:

I have often been much diverted, while watching two males in fierce conflict, by seeing them move alternately backwards and forwards, as either had obtained a better hold, their wings drooping, their tails partly raised, their body-feathers ruffled, and their heads covered with blood. If, as they thus struggle, and gasp for breath, one of them should lose his hold, his chance is over, for the other, still holding fast, hits him violently with spurs and wings, and in a few minutes brings him to the ground. The moment he is dead, the conqueror treads him under foot, but, what is strange, not with hatred, but with all the motions which he employs in caressing the female.

When the male has discovered and made up to the female (whether such a combat has previously taken place or not), if she be more than one year old, she also struts and gobbles, turns round him as he continues strutting, suddenly opens her wings, throws herself towards him, as if to put a stop to his idle delay, lays herself down, and receives his dilatory caresses.

What lessons, you’re wondering, can we take from this to our Thanksgiving feasts? 1) Your turkey could have been friends with your dog, 2) John James Audubon enjoyed a good cockfight, and 3) He and Darwin were both sensational prose stylists. I think only the final one is something to be thankful for.

(Top image: "Final Beak Dance," by Steve Voght; Bottom Image: "The Wild Turkey," by John James Audubon.)