Graveyard Turkeys: Round 2!

I’m in Ottawa for a couple weeks, which meant a return to Beechwood cemetery to keep hounding their flock of wild turkeys. I hoped to walk away from the trip with all the footage I would need for the wild turkey episode I'm cooking up (apologies to turkeys for the insensitive analogy).

And… turkeys? Yes! In a really serendipitous way. 

On my first trip out, I was mostly there to capture establishing shots and beauties of the cemetery itself to open the episode. And it delivered - it’s a beautiful place, after all, and I went late afternoon when I could make use of the dipping sun peeking between gravestones and casting long shadows on the snow.

No turkeys that time. And I wondered if I’d have any luck at all. The snow’s been heavy this winter, apart from the roads the whole cemetery is buried a few feet deep. I couldn’t imagine if I was a wild turkey I’d have any good reason to pick my way across - or through - that kind of snow when there didn’t seem to be any advantage. But the cemetery is so close to my temporary home, it was worth just planning a few more circuits to hope for the best. Worst case, you get a lovely walk out of it.

The next time I went, it was actually for a more specific target - in establishing the cemetery I wanted to highlight some of the famous gravesites there. So, armed with a map and location info, I went on a scavenger hunt. Harder than I expected - the snow meant I had to stick to the paths around the wide sections, squinting through lines of gravestones to make out names. The cemetery site often wouldn’t include a picture of the gravestone itself. Google image searches sometimes would, but often in summer. Many of the stones were currently half buried.

Vive la difference

But it was also kinda fun - I can say that confidently on the other side of it because I did get the three graves I was most interested in with some light detective work.

That was my success parameter for the day, but wouldn’t you know it, as I was mid-shooting one of the famous gravesites, I glanced to one side and saw two turkeys ambling down the road.

So, I detoured to follow them and the lead me to the whole flock. Thanks to some good samaritans, either employees at the cemetery or passers-by, there was seed on the side of some of the paths, which explains why they’d still be making the rounds. Plus, they do a pretty good job of staying on top of the snow when they have to cross it.

I hung out with the turkeys for an hour or so, and they kept up the reliable behaviour of being wary for the first ten minutes or so before deciding I wasn’t so scary after all and mostly ignoring me.

I got some delightful footage of them around, between and even on the gravestones before finally deciding it was time to leave them alone. I grabbed one more famous gravesite before looping around to exit.

Very album-cover-coded

But there was one welcome surprise left. I’d been struggling with an unanswered question for the episode: cemetery turkeys are the hook, but it’s broadly about why we have wild turkeys at all, which means ideally I’d have footage of turkeys, you know… anywhere but specifically a cemetery.

Over the years I’ve grabbed a shot here and there - a couple at Point Pelee, one at Presquille Provincial Park - I just didn’t know if I had enough to cover the idea of wild turkeys in the wild.

But as I looped around the cemetery, here was another flock off to the side of the grounds that is still heavily forested. No graves, no asphalt. Even better: turkeys in trees, probably to keep them off of the frozen ground, along with some picking around dirt piles. 

All of a sudden my worries were moot - between the turkeys in the trees and the turkeys on the ground I covered a whole bunch of options for wild turkeys in the wild - even if, technically, that wild is a little fake.

Regardless, it let me put a stamp on turkeys. Episode: shot? Maybe. Minimum Viable Product, at least. I have a temptation to head out to Port Rowan once I’m back home to take a single shot of a plaque commemorating the first release of wild turkeys in Ontario’s reintroduction program. It’s a deliberation I find myself in a lot, weighing the 2+ hour drive each way for what might literally be one shot and less than 5 seconds in the edit. But… I kind of love doing those arbitrary road trips. We’ll see.