PBS Nature: My Life As A Turkey

I was pleasantly surprised to learn recently that PBS Nature was going to air a show on wild turkeys this month. I was absolutely blown over when I learned the program was to be an adaptation of a fantastic book: Illumination in the Flatwoods by Joe Hutto.
This book is not a scientific book. It details the more than a year that the author spent imprinting and raising some wild turkeys. By raising, I don’t mean keeping in a pen- Mr. Hutto became a turkey mother to these chicks, and spent his days with them exploring the natural areas around his house. While he is not experimentally driven in the tradition of Lorenz or Heinrich, he is, if anything more detailed in his insights into young turkey social behavior and development. The book is beautifully written (and at least in my older edition, filled with great little sketches as well), and quite emotionally charged.
In many ways, the book was everything that my dissertation research was not. The first year of turkey social life is still a black box- we know that male display teams form very early on in life, potentially in the first few days after hatching, but we still have no direct observation of what goes on at this stage. This book’s focus on development in “natural” wild turkeys is the closest we’ve come to uncovering these mysteries.

The PBS Nature show is called My Life as a Turkey, and looks to be a well done re-enactment of things that happened in the book. I don’t know a lot of details, but it looks like they basically repeated the whole context, with an actor instead of the author, who imprints a new batch of turkeys. Check your local listings!