Rethinking Turkey and the Chamber of Secrets!

Since I was a wee lad, in the wilds of the Yucatan – I’ve loved Thanksgiving.

There’s nothing quite like the feeling of spending a week tracking the monstrous Yucanese Wild Turkey or (Meleagris gallopavo). They are cunning, so cunning – in an ironic twist of fate, or the truth is stranger than fiction department – more people are killed every year by the carnivorous bird than the other way round. The animal is most dangerous after the female turkey mates, she prepares a nest under a bush in the woods and lays her tan and speckled brown eggs.

She incubates as many as 18 eggs at a time.  It takes about a month for the chicks to hatch, once born they are called Poults (from birth they sport razor-sharp talons and have acid for blood, apparently these birds were the catalyst for hollywood director, Ridley Scott to make the first Aliens movie).

The Turkeys can reach heights of nearly 6 meters or 18 feet from nail to outstretched beak. Independent labs ascertained the beak is made from a carbon fibre – titanium alloy which allows it to peck through a 3 inch piece of concrete, or 1.5 inches of lead – more if the bird is agitated or aroused, which is the males nearly constant state.

Famed ornithologist, Dr. Hugo Miserthorpington lived amongst the Wild Turkeys for nearly a year in the mid 70’s and no one has been able to further his work, or even learn from his studies as only one half of his eyeglasses and an orange piece of Lego were found at his decimated camp.

Fragments of notes were pieced together by the heavily armed Navy Seals who went in to rescue him after his emergency transponder was activated – but they were unable to decipher his writing – except for one strange passage where he pronounces his love for one of the females he had named Cicely Tyson…. odd….

Ever since then, men – manly men, have tested their mettle by stalking the bird, crawling through the mud, bare-chested, a bowie-knife held firm between your teeth, nothing to eat but a week old package of Skittles and a flat can of fresca. All the discomfort, the misery – all of it disappears once you spot the caruncle (or brightly colored growths on the throat region) strutting through the brush.

A well-timed slashing motion at either the snood (the flap of skin that hangs over the turkey’s beak) or the Wattle (the flap of skin under the turkey’s chin) will ensure swift dispatch of the dangerous creature. They sure do have lots of business on the neck going on…

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Then it is off to Safeway to buy some fixin’s, mashed taters, green beans, gravy, mushrooms… oh and a butterball – because those damn Yucanese birds are so bloody gamey as to be inedible. Seriously it’s like eating.. well really there is nothing that it compares to – maybe if you were to eat a Kangaroo placenta that had been dipped in kerosene, and burned to a crisp.

Then, the putrid, petroleum smelling mass were coated in a fecal glaze, made from the week old fermented stool of a sick and dying jackal and boiled in a pot of 9 day old donkey urine. That might put you in the general neighbourhood of what this bird tastes like… Actually this whole story has put me off turkey, we’ll probably just have ham.

Which reminds me of the killer pigs of the Mongolian steppes, it seems these brutes…..

Happy Thanksgiving.

Have a Great Day