The Best News I've Had All Day

[kevyn]

Nature will abide. Nature will adapt. Nature will evolve. This pleases me.

Wild Turkeys Have Adapted to Suburban, Urban Living

By 1851, wild turkeys had been hunted to extinction in Massachusetts. But now, they're making a comeback, in an unexpected way:

"The turkeys are spreading through suburbia. Wild turkeys, once eliminated in Massachusetts, are flourishing from Plymouth to Concord and - to the surprise of some wildlife officials - making forays into densely populated suburban and urban areas, including parts of Boston, Cambridge and, most recently, Brookline."

"Who knew? The last time there were turkeys in Massachusetts there weren't a whole heck of a lot of suburbs."
Read more at Boston.com

My response: Get used to it. Have the police and animal control weed out the aggressive ones, teach the human population how to behave around the turkey population. Let them live in our urban jungles, and enjoy this little piece of nature adapting to us.

Now, if we could just get a campaign started to get them reinstated as the national bird, like Ben Franklin wanted...

Comments

[bluebear2.livejournal.com]

It's pretty neat how creatures adapt. It used to be that the mere presence of a small town of people caused bald eagles to leave and nowadays we see them circling overhead above metro Vancouver looking for rats.

[kadyg.livejournal.com]

In similar news: There are coyotes in Golden Gate Park. This pleases me greatly, even more so when I found out that SF Animal Control has an official hands-off policy regarding them - unless they get aggressive which has only happened once that I know of.

[bluebear2.livejournal.com]

There are coyotes within Vancouver now and they sometimes eat people's pets.

Coyote Anecdote

[kevynjacobs.livejournal.com]

When I was in high school (back when Reagan was president of the U.S.), we lived on the Fort Irwin military base out in the middle of California's Mojave Desert. We had a bunch of coyotes that hung around the housing area, living off of garbage and pets.

My best friend in high school was the son of the Chief of Military Police on the base, and one day he and his family were enjoying a nice day in their back yard with their 13-year-old arthritic toy poodle. In broad daylight, with the whole family there to witness it, a coyote ran up, grabbed Shah in his jaws, and ran off into the desert. Needless to say, the family was horrified, and they never saw the poodle again. Pretty traumatic.

The next day, all of the MPs on the base had orders to shoot all coyotes on sight (up until then, they just ignored them).

Interesting thing is, my mother (a Major at the time) got in trouble over this. Mom has a soft touch for animals -- any animals -- and always feeds the stray critters that come around. Dogs, cats, birds, foxes, deer, and yes, coyotes. One night, the MPs caught her feeding the coyotes in our back yard (we lived just around the corner from where the poodle-snatching took place). Mom would put food out in the yard, then stand on the porch and talk to the coyotes who would come to eat her offerings.

Needless to say, the MPs and my friend's family were *NOT* amused. Mom was lucky to get off with just a stern warning.

She still does it to this day, feeding the critters. She's the kind of person who always has about 20 stray cats hanging around (outdoors only), lots of bid and squirrel feeders (which keeps the stray cats happy) and a big salt block in the yard for the deer to lick. She even has a fox that beds in one of her shrubs near the front porch.

I take after her. Some of my neighbours don't like me because I feed the neighbourhood birds, the cats & dogs, the raccoons... I'm always throwing stale bread and food scraps into the side yard.

What can I say, I am my mother's child! ;-)