Friday, August 11, 2006

two turkeys

I'm beginning to worry about some turkeys.

Actually, two turkeys. Two particular turkeys.

These turkeys are of the avian sort (not the human ones, which is another issue entirely).

These two turkeys, females, have been sitting on one nest, of sorts, for over a month now.

Without moving.

I never see them getting up for water.

Or getting up for a meal.

No visiting the feeder or the bins of damaged vegetable I put in the pasture every evening.

Or getting up and walking around just to stretch their legs.

Or hang out with the other birds.

No matter what time of day or night I go by the bird pasture, and look into this one clump of weeds and bushes growing right in the middle of the pasture, there they are.

Not moving.

Sitting as close together as they can. Sitting on, what appears to be, one poorly constructed nest of weeds and wood chips and feathers.

All day long these two turkeys just sit there, hardly moving, resting, I assume, on a nest of eggs.

(the last time this happened though, the last time a turkey decided to sit on a nest for weeks and weeks on end there turned out to be only one egg in the nest. An egg that never hatched out).

But lets go to the farm news.

Rain. We got some rain this morning but we still need plenty of rain. We need about an inch of rain a week and for the past three weeks it hasn't been raining at all.

Corn. The problem is that where our corn is growing, in the southern part of the county, it hasn't rained in just about a month. And corn, even an old time variety like silver queen, needs water to fill out (those new genetically engineered double super sweet corns that you are now seeing in the supermarkets demand huge amounts of water or they don't grow). If we don't get a significant rainfall, and soon, the five weeks of sweet corn we have growing will not develop. Which means no corn. Let's hope for rain.

Our crops. I've been watering and mostly everything growing within reach of our sprinklers is doing fine. The pumps are fixed, the gun sprinkler and the couple dozen smaller sprinklers are working, and the spring up the hill from our crops is continuing to put out 15 gallons or so a minute (we have another spring, a large spring down hill from the fields that I am beginning to develop for irrigation purposes, I've begun to put in place a storage tank and a pump with piping to push it up the hill to the vegetable gardens).

Heat. Last week's 90 plus degree days took a toll on our vegetables. The aubergine (garden eggs), stopped growing as did the peppers. The tomatoes, on the other-hand, started ripening prematurely. While we are getting massive amounts of ripe tomatoes right now (we picked something like 5000 tomatoes in the last week), it might cause our tomato season to be shorter. We'll see.

So, back to the turkeys.

What should I do? I've been tempted to at least lift them up to see if they are in fact laying on eggs. The last time they had an urge to sit, back in the spring, they only had one egg between the two of them. Do you think there are any eggs this time?

Or should I just leave them alone and count it off as just another example of turkey behavior?

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