When I was a kid we had neighbors who always had a few turkeys along with their chickens and they told a similar tale - their dad would make them go out and make sure the turkeys went into the coop anytime it looked like it was about to rain because the turkeys would look up and drown. Seemed pretty far-fetched to me as a ~7-year-old and I remember fighting back against it but these girls were so adamant that it was true that I figured maybe they were right? I'm not sure who the dupe is in this story!
Regarding drowned turkeys though... I lived in Eastern NC when Hurricane Floyd came through in 1999 and a lot of the industrial turkey farms in Onslow and Pender and Duplin counties got flooded and tens of thousands of turkeys died and then got washed away out of their barns by the overflowing New and Cape Fear rivers and piled up in the fields to bake in the mid-September North Carolina heat and humidity along with all their waste that got washed out with them. Turkey and chicken farms aren't particularly pleasant to smell on the best of days. Add in the late summer sun and things only get exponentially worse.
At the time, the office building I worked on was on the banks the New River downstream from all the farms and we had a little pier with a pavillion on it that went out into the river where we'd go have lunch or take a break. It took a few days after the hurricane but those smells eventually made their way downstream. It was beyond putrid out there for a couple weeks.
