Friday, September 24, 2010

Friday Fowl

The turkeys are still wandering the neighborhood; there has been no attrition, and they just keep growing and growing. They are getting less skittish (which equates to more reckless), so I wonder how long until one of them gets dinged. I also wonder if they will stay, and we'll have a resident flock.
These guys are all descendants of birds introduced to California in the 1800s. Since it's impractical to import a huge number of birds, this population probably has pretty limited genetic diversity and is pretty inbred. It's not too surprising, therefore, that we saw an interesting "sport" the other day on the bike trail--a silver turkey. It's not albino, but it's sort of a gray color like tarnished silver, and it still has all the bars on its feathers. It would be interesting to follow this population for a while, and see how the descendants of this bird turn out.

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