Holiday Graveyard Turkeys
When I go to visit family in Ottawa, I’ll often go for walks in Beechwood Cemetery. It’s convenient, peaceful, beautifully maintained and it’s equally so in all seasons.
Over so many visits across so many years, there’s something else I seem to be able to rely on Beechwood Cemetery for: wild turkeys.
A significant flock has taken up year-round residence here, a striking sight against the lines of gravestones. I suppose it’s not altogether surprising - the manicured grounds give them lots of room to forage, and the cemetery is bordered by some woodland left a little wild if they ever need to retreat from the anthropocentric interior.
Once I recognized that they were a fixture of the place, I started wondering about an episode on them. The visual of the turkeys picking their way between headstones is an obvious hook. But as I did research into this specific flock, it seemed like I was the only one who was really curious about the particulars. Sure, I found articles that made reference to them, but never in an investigatory way. The answer to my question: ‘why is there a dedicated flock of wild turkeys in Beechwood Cemetery’ seemed to be ‘there just are’, and beyond the visual there was no real ‘there’ there.
Regardless, it’s hard to resist when you’re strolling through and see them crossing the road in front of you, so I’d accumulate footage haphazardly on my phone with no specific plan for it. That is until this winter and a much more focused effort at getting a new tranche of episodes done.
This was the first time I’d actually haul my gear out with me to see if the turkeys would oblige. And, by expanding the scope of the story slightly (from this particular flock at this particular cemetery to a broader question about how we ended up with wild turkeys in our urban areas in general) I finally had the hook I needed to justify the episode.
On a frigid (but by Ottawa standards, relatively mild) afternoon we set out to capture them properly at best, and have a nice stroll at worst. It was looking like the latter and I was convinced that the turkeys had hunkered down beneath an evergreen canopy far from our walking route but lo and behold, there they were, across a line of graves and poking their way along a road.
A rule of thumb with wildlife - especially life that barely counted as wild, like these very urbanized birds - is that they’ll usually be extremely wary of you at the first encounter, but if you behave yourself and don’t do anything dramatic they’ll soon decide that their overabundance of caution is not worth the effort. So - on first approach, delicate as we might have been, they kept their distance and moved on quick. When we came around to encounter them again, they couldn’t care less.
They’d gathered around the base of a tree that was clearly a good bet for scratching up some food, and they certainly were not letting my encroachment stop them. To the point where some even started approaching - not in a threatening way, I’d guess they can sometimes guilt some food out of people. And so we hung out there, them and I, in that rare circumstance where you can casually film their behaviour to your heart’s content, no panic over how long you’ve got before they flee, no constant calculus about the risk of getting closer vs losing them entirely. I could circumnavigate the flock all I wanted, catching angles, switching lenses, and the turkeys were all too happy to keep doing what they were doing.
So, big success on the first try. I’ll likely need a couple more similar days to get everything I need but it was certainly motivating.
On the way out we also noticed a gathering of crows in the branches of a tree, more by the second. Slightly morbid site in the middle of a cemetery and as I tried to catch a shot of the tree that did justice to their numbers, a whole additional flock more crossed in the break between two others. Still not sure if they were just naturally flocking that way or if they knew something we didn’t - some enticing bit of roadkill or carrion. But it was another serendipitous event - one of the handful of episodes I’m working out is about the origins of weird collective nouns for animals, and there’s probably none more widely known than a murder of crows.
The next day we also struck out for a stand of sugar maples just south of the cemetery, though restrictively separated from it by an unbroken fence. Sugar maples are another episode subject, and this area came complete with a small cabin a sucre, or sugar shack, and tapped trees. The maple harvest wouldn’t begin until later in the season (when I hope to return to capture it) but for now, it was enough to catch the trees in their winter stillness, and the aftermath of previous years’ taps.
Ambitions for the new year: I’m getting close to having enough footage for a couple of these winter episodes to move into editing, so hopefully more updates on that front soon!