HOME & GARDEN: Jebediah the turkey annually holds court in Londesborough garden
BY SCOTT STEPHENSON
When Angela Cullen and her family moved to their new home in Londesborough in 2016, they had a lot of exciting plans for the backyard. They constructed an impressive treehouse in a giant willow tree, planted flower beds that overflowed with beautiful blooms every spring and populated a coop with some productive chickens. One thing the family didn’t plan on, however, was sharing their outdoor living space with a bird of a different feather - a wild turkey!
It all started when Cullen awoke one morning to the distinctive sound of gobbling. At first, she thought that the motley jumble of syllables was a relic of slumberland.“I thought I was dreaming of turkeys,” she recalled fondly. “But then, we looked outside and there he was!” Standing out in their yard was the bird that her son would soon name Jebediah, or Jeb, for short.
In the three years since Jeb first announced his arrival, he’s made an impression on most everybody who has encountered him at the Cullen homestead. All visitors are met with gobbles of greeting, and, while he may not directly approach most people, his interest in new experiences is obvious, and his enthusiastic explorations of his surroundings never cease to entertain. He has learned to fit through the diminutive door of the chicken coop, and has excavated a fair number of the flower beds. Cullen only occasionally laments the loss of those lovely flowers. “You can’t really get mad at Jeb,” she said. “It’s impossible to be in a bad mood around him.”
When he’s not following the chickens around, the chickens are following him. Little brown hens like Henrietta and Shakira run at top speed to keep up with their much larger comrade. Things are perhaps a little more complicated for French Fry the rooster, who would certainly have been cock of the walk if not for Jeb. Even when French Fry fully fluffs up all his feathers, he’s still just a tiny titan in comparison to the goliath before him. The family’s cat, Hazard, is happy to chase barn swallows to and fro, but tends not to mess with Jeb. A similar policy has been adopted by Duke the dog, one of Hazard’s longtime allies.“This is just our little funny farm,” Cullen said of her menagerie.
You wouldn’t know it from looking at the truly striking tom he is today, but when he arrived on the family’s property, Jeb had fallen on hard times. “He was really beat up,” Cullen recalled of that first encounter. While her heart went out to the poor creature, the family understood that they had to approach the wild animal in their midst with caution, both for his safety and theirs. She noted that he was both small and still beardless. A turkey’s beard, which sprouts from the chest and looks like a miniature horse’s tail, normally starts coming in at around the five-month mark, which meant that Jebediah was still just a young poult. Any attempt to tame the young bird could have jeopardized any efforts he might have made to reconvene with other wild turkeys once he regained his strength. Even now, years into Jeb’s co-habitation with the chickens with no sign that he plans to fly the coop, Cullen respects her caruncled guest’s personal freedom. “I never want to push him,” she explained. “I always want him to be able to go if he wants to go.”
Her feathered familiar has also given Cullen a real appreciation for how beautiful wild turkeys are. Jeb’s iridescent feathers are reminiscent of his fancier relatives in the Phasianidae family, which includes other heavy ground living game birds like partridges, pheasants and peafowl. He’s also got a great wattle, and, although his snood may be a little smaller than average, it’s still nothing at which to sneeze.
As the situation currently stands, Jebediah seems set on sticking around the Cullen property. It’s not exactly commonplace for a wild turkey to join a flock of chickens, but it’s also not unheard of. In fact, Jeb’s choice to stick close to some human companions offers a fascinating window to the distant past. Modern domestic turkeys are the direct descendants of wild turkeys, which were domesticated by early Indigenous farmers, around 2,500 BCE. The Aztec people, who lived in what is now Mexico, were some of the earliest turkey poulterers on record, and their society had a special place for this regal bird. While Aztec turkeys were eaten for their meat, their feathers were used for ceremonial garb, and they were also featured in art and burial rituals. There is even an Aztec god, Tezcatlipoca, who takes on a turkey form, known as Chalchiuhtotolin, that is capable of helping humans to overcome their fates.
Respecting Jeb’s essential wild-ness also means that he is always at risk of becoming a casualty of circumstance - wild turkeys are frequently targeted by predatory animals like coyotes, and licensed humans in Ontario hunt them for their meat and plumage in the spring and fall. Cullen knows that none of the turkey hunters she counts amongst her friends and family would ever knowingly turn Jeb into deep-fried morsels and a mounted fan, but she still worries that a hunter passing through the area might mistake him for one of the thousands of turkeys that haven’t roosted in the hearts of Huron County citizens and chickens. But he is still a wild animal, and his fate is not hers to decide.
The Cullens have simply made space in their lives for the presence of this bird, and in that space, something both magnificent and silly has developed. It is a relationship that defies categorization, and ascends to the untranslatable. Having Jeb in their lives has shown them that the noble spirit of a humble turkey can embiggen even the smallest moments.