Gquowp-gquowp-gquowp! For the last few days we’ve been hearing a different call around the yard, coming at any time of the daylight hours. I’ve spelled it as best I can there, but it’s not an utterance with which I’m familiar. I had heard that our town had its own complement of wild turkeys but I never thought I’d see them in such a suburban setting. The nearest strip of real woods is on the canalized creek-bed a quarter-mile away and yet, gquowp….gquowp….gquowp-gquowp, now and again.
Then came the early morning sightings out the kitchen window. Preparing food in the kitchen for the morning feedings, checking out the window to see how low the finch’s thistle-seed feeder has gotten since the day before, when, just outside the front door and down between the retaining walls where the violets used to grow, a long neck and large head move cautiously forward, revealing a fairly large feathered torso on stilts, across onto the left-hand neighbor’s front yard. Up along the edge of the hedge, followed openly, about four feet back, by the right-hand neighbor’s petite tabby cat, who looks frankly astonished. Which look changes, once she sees us looking out at her, to something like “I could take that, ” as she comes back to our front walk. The turkey, like a magic trick, vanished in the short time we were watching the cat.
We saw it a couple of times in the next few days, strutting from the right-hand neighbors, across the open cul-de-sac and up the driveway du jour 
to vanish into thin air, somehow, when it reached a house. Then it seemed to have gone from the neighborhood.
Until this afternoon, gquowp….gquowp…gquowp..mumbling a couple of feet to the left of the backyard glass door. Still looking for other turkeys, I guess. I went and got the camera, hoping to get a good shot, but when I returned it had, yes, vanished, so I hurried out the front door to catch it coming down the side driveway. Peeked around the corner: nothing. Went all the way around the house the other way: nothing. Then, faintly, gquowp! Gquowp…gquowp. I went back around front, looked ’round the yard and found nothing. Gquowp-gquowp-gquowp-gquowp-gquowp! Oh, the sound was from something taller than I am, 
and there was the turkey, on the ridge of the garage, neck extended, calling and looking for other turkeys. I took a couple of shots, until it seemed uneasy. I backed away onto the porch, checked exposures quickly and went back, hoping for a closer shot or a preening or wings-extended shot. No turkey on the roof, but there it was, at the bottom of the front garden walking up across the neighbor’s lawn, on its way to vanishing again. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear the thing teleports!
I hope I get some more tries, it’s a tricky critter!
Has the early spring brought you new visitors this year?
Cheers,
pete
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