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RTDNTOTO 🐻 Random Thoughts Deserving No Thread Of Their Own 20 (2025)

jumbach said:
Where I grew up in Sacramento, there were a lot of wild turkeys flying around. You just get used to them. (And yes, Carlson, they do fly, just awkwardly.)
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We would see pheasants everywhere in the rural areas surrounding the metro Detroit area when I was a kid, even in some of the more abandoned/derelict areas in the city of Detroit. We would never see turkeys.

These days, pheasants are pretty rare in SE Michigan (though I did read in the last year or so that populations have been on the rise again) and wild turkeys are EVERYWHERE! There are certain neighborhoods I run through where it's not uncommon to see multiple flocks (gaggles? rafters? groups?) of a dozen+ at a time. On my long Saturday run a couple weekends ago I ran past one flock where I lost count at 40 - that was the largest group I've seen in one spot.

Our daughter's high school has a smallish open air courtyard that turkeys like to get stuck in from time to time (early early in the mornings they like to find their way onto the low part of the roof by jumping/flying onto a couple dumpsters then onto the roof where they wander around and get into the courtyard but the courtyard is much lower than the ground outside the school and they cannot fly high enough to get back to the roof once they are in there and there isn't anything in the courtyard for them to fly/jump to to act as a step). The is a short trail behind a museum in our downtown that takes a steep climb through the woods down a ravine to connect to another trail and some aggressive turkeys like to monopolize the path a lot of mornings. One day a couple years ago I was walking to get a coffee at the Starbucks near our house and waiting to cross the street at a busy intersection when a very aggressive tom came out of a parking lot and up a little hill and started ruffling his feathers at me and getting closer and closer like it was trying to push me out into traffic. We had a whole brood of turkeys living under some bushes near the loading dock into our office building one spring (the babies are pretty cute). One year I kept hearing a bunch of scratches on our roof above our bedroom every day around 5:00 AM and finally saw a group of 5 or 10 turkeys up there when I was leaving for a run one morning (I trimmed a bunch of low branches off some nearby trees and that seemed to solve that problem). Our elementary school, which is right in probably one of the most dense residential neighborhoods in the Detroit area had a problem with turkeys tying up traffic every morning a few years ago... They are everywhere and to make it worse the get big and they get aggressive. But their poop isn't as gross as what the geese leave behind so I guess I'd rather have the turkeys.

Until finding this article just now, I didn't realize that turkeys had been wiped out in Michigan by the early 1900s and didn't really start making a comeback in significant numbers until a few decades ago:

Wiped Out in Michigan, Wild Turkeys Gobbled Their Way Back
 
Oh, to the 2000 club.

(6 now, but no inflating because that's cheatin'.)

I was thinking geography.

How the hell has it been almost 2,000 posts already?
 
jumbach said:
Oh, to the 2000 club.

(6 now, but no inflating because that's cheatin'.)

I was thinking geography.

How the hell has it been almost 2,000 posts already?
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You have alot on your mind or have a lot to say.
 
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