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Dianne:
It’s kind of funny how these things happen, one day you’re telling that big beautiful turkey what a pretty girl she is, and the next you’re questioning her gender.
Anna or Andy has been with us since the middle of summer and we have watched the bird grow from a timid disobedient teenager into a self-confident, defiant young adult.
When things started getting blurry for us was when he/she started to “show” like male turkeys do — meaning that they puff up, fan their tail feathers, and stomp about like a sumo wrestler looking for a fight. We went about our business remarking how pretty she was when her head was all purple and how fluffy she looked when she showed and my what a long snood she had.
When threatened Andy would put on a show, which made sense. After all, when threatened, a female dog will raise her hackles and hump a new dog showing the new intruder that she is “top dog”. This fall Andy was showing more often, he would show for Al the rooster, he would show for me but mostly he would show for the hens.
It’s kind of intimidating having a Sumo Turkey weighing in at over 30 pounds following your 4-pound hens or sneaking up behind you as you do yard work. More then once I had to leave my tools and give Andy a hug — the one thing that transformed him or her back into a smooth-feathered, questioning bird. Apparently my hugs are much more terrifying than Angry Al or my scary new tools.
Mark and I started thinking she may really be a boy when she started to gobble, and her snood started growing beyond her beak. What made us believe she was a girl? Well, the woman who surrendered him/her to us had said she was, and she looked like the girl birds at Farm Sanctuary (when she was smooth). So this past week I looked online to see if there was a way to tell. What I found out is that it is very difficult for the layperson to tell. The one thing the websites did mention was that females don’t gobble and males don’t lay eggs.
So Andy has not laid an egg and he will at times produce a loud gobble. It’s not a constant dependable gobble, it’s more of a reaction gobble — when we are doing rooster calls or when he hears the Skill Saw.
The last couple of days Anna has become Andy, not that it matters to the bird, but it seems like if you are going to strut your masculinity around with such a big performance that the respectful thing to do would be to give the turkey a more masculine sounding name.
Introducing our big, strong turkey as Annabelle just makes people giggle so until he produces an egg, we will stick with the name Andy Bell.
