It's common knowledge that Ben Franklin suggested that the Wild Turkey be the symbol of the new Nation, yet some American Indian tribes thought Turkeys to be stupid and cowardly, and wouldn't eat them for fear of acquiring these traits.  But ask any hunter and they will tell you just how difficult it is to even find one of these huge Thanksgiving regulars when you have a gun.  In my experience they are fast and sneaky considering their size, and at certain times of the year the male is the nastiest thing in the valley.  

    I was working for a little old woman that owned a log cabin the size of the county building, and one afternoon in the spring she came out on the front deck to ask me if I could chase the Turkeys out of her backyard.  Sure I said, and walked around back to "chase" the little Turkeys away.  The hens, of which there were eight or ten, took off over the fence or ran out the front gate, and I was left face to face with the largest bird I had ever seen in my life.  This Tom Turkey was nearly nose to beak with me when he got himself to full, stretched out height.  It really surprised me just how big this monster was, and I would know, look how many of his distant relatives I had eaten. But I was ready, or so I thought, to run this interloper out of the yard.  

     But this was now his territory, and he wasn't going to leave on this beautiful spring afternoon no matter who I was.  Trying the usual verbal abuses and yelling did nothing but make him very angry; he would jump up like a karate master and rake my chest with his claws that left welts.  I would yell and curse and flail away to no response from him other than more of his frightening attacks on me.  Being a boyhood baseball player, I grabbed the only large stick nearby, the size of a child's ball bat, and when he landed after another strike on me, I hit him on his breast (this was a Turkey) with everything I had in me.  I swear to my readers now, it was like hitting the tire on my wife's truck.  I new then that this was the toughest thing in the valley, and wasn't it any wonder Ben admired them; so I used a little Turkey Psychology.  I got his attention and directed it to his harem that was now forty yards down the road!  And just that easy, he was gone and never returned again.

     After hiking the Wind River Canyon for more then a quarter century, I'd never seen even one Turkey, that is until a couple of weeks ago.  How they got here or from which direction I'll never know, but we now have four huge Tom Turkeys running around this central neighborhood of the canyon.  The little pony-tail on their breast is cute, and they are just as magical when they disappear like Harry Potter.  This week's photo was taken during that first early blizzard; not quite snow yet, but very cold.  I was wet and frozen and so was my Canon 7D, but it performed wonderfully.  Look closely and you will see those almost snowflakes in the photograph.  The RAW file was worked in the Canon software and then converted to a TIFF and worked in Lightroom 5.2.  The shutter was a slow handheld shot at 1/640 at f-stop 6.3 with the ISO at a higher than I like 800.  The file was amazing when you consider that I never thought I would see a Wild Turkey in my backyard, in the Wind River Canyon; until next week, keep your camera ready.

Wild Turkey, Wind River Canyon, WyomingWild Turkey in the Wind River Canyon, Wyoming.