White Turkeys Trill Lovely Songs

These are not statue turkeys

These dudes look like statue sentinels. All that displaying is hard work. Puffed up chests and vibrating feathers. They are a work of art, so alive.

White turkeys are abnormal. They are a genetic fluke artificially selected by humans. Turkey eaters apparently dislike bronze-colored turkeys so obviously farmers manipulated turkey genetics to create an evolutionarily nonsensical color pattern.


Myth-makers like to claim domestic turkeys are stupid, that they will look into the raining sky and drown themselves.

Seneca has blue eyes b/c he is bad-ass

I wish people would not believe such stupidity. Domestic double-breasted turkeys may be freaks in that they physically cannot mate, fly or perch without risk of broken bones, but their basic survival instinct has not disappeared. They do not drown in the rain.

They do sing. A lot. They tell their small stories in grandiose displays of feathers and sound. I feel nothing but love for them. When I sit with these five turkey boys, I think of how someone would have sat around their corpse for Thanksgiving. And I am saddened and horrified and so much more, because who I see is not muscle and fat and sinew - I see Miwok and Cheyenne and Seneca. I see individuals where most see nothing at all.