As turkey hunters, we try hard to find birds. In the suburbs, some can’t avoid them.
We wear camouflage and keep movements to a minimum in our effort to kill one. Something as simple as moving a shotgun or bow for the clinching shot can put these paranoid birds on red alert. Alarm putting and a swift departure follows.
But this isn’t so in the highly-populated Northeastern suburbs where turkey flocks are causing trouble, often among a non-hunting population that knows little of the bird’s tendencies. It’s reported that in Massachusetts, one resident, armed with an iPhone, recently attempted to scare a wild turkey away from his door by making sounds with the hand-held device.
“It’s been really bad,” said Harmony Hill’s Sean Roche. “The biggest (male) turkey was in front of my back door the other day, and I couldn’t get out of the house. I tried scaring it away by making noises with my iPhone, but that didn’t work. Eventually, I had to use my dogs to scare it away, which I hate to do.” Roche indicated the turkeys show little fear of humans or cars. “They have been causing commotion in the Washington/Harmony Hill intersection for over a month,” Roche stated.
But this isn’t a new problem, and in the past some Eastern suburbanites have taken more forceful, illegal actions. The New York Post recently reported: “Several years ago, a Staten Island man was busted for allegedly firing bottle rockets at a group of the birds to drive them off his property.” As you might guess, it didn’t work. Earlier this month a motorist deliberately drove through a flock of turkeys. “This was bound to happen,” witness Anthony J. Carro reported, stating the turkeys sometimes hang out on his front lawn. “The roadways are so congested. Everybody’s in a rush . . .” Except the big birds.
Too many turkeys is a good problem to have, right?