Aggressive Turkeys Rampaging Across Massachusetts

You may or may not have noticed the Turkey Aggression going on around you.

Turkeys are not a creature that you should fear, and that headline up there is more me not knowing what else to write than an attempt to start a Mercury Theater-style panic. A turkey can injure you, make no mistake, but we'll get to that later in the article.

In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love, and half or so of the turkeys are male. Love is in the air if you're a turkey, as it is mating season. I'd like to meet the person who scientifically named the turkey's mating season "the Gobbling."

Gobbling starts in mid-March, the peak runs mid-April through May, and broods start appearing in June. Turkeys get a bit aggressive during mating season, and can also be touchy when the Bay Bays are around.

Take that, tie it into our headline, and you'll see where we're headed today.

I know that broods aren't supposed to appear until June, but this guy started early and had his Bay-Bay payoff before Tax Day... unless those are hens, at which point I apologize to the turkeys in question.

Turkeys are native to America, and the nation of Turkey has no native, primordial population of them. Turkey/country lent her name to Turkey/bird via the European poultry trade with the Ottoman Empire. Opinions vary on the specifics (colonists may have mistaken American turkeys for Turkish guineafowl, which was imported all over the Mediterranean from Constantinople/Istanbul), but that's the basic etymology.

Massachusetts was crawling with turkeys by the time the Pilgrims arrived, and the Native Americans were eating them by 1100 AD or so. European explorers introduced the turkey to England in 1550.

As the Other White Meat expanded across Massachusetts, they cut down the forests and used the leftovers for farmland. Turkeys, being both a forest-dwelling bird and a tasty bird, did not fare well following the arrival of Mr. White and his family. Turkeys did not survive the 19th Century in Massachusetts, with the last native one being killed (on Mount Tom of all places, wokka wokka wokka) in the 1850s.

Farmland began to revert to forest in Massachusetts during the Industrial Revolution, as farm goods were imported into the state by the new railroads. This presented an opportunity for turkeys to return, although resettlement efforts in the first 70 years of the 20th Century failed in Massachusetts. Part of the problem is that these efforts involved farm-bred, Butterball style turkeys, and they fared poorly upon their release in the wild.

1972 saw the importation of wild turkeys from New York, and these 37 birds (and overflow from neighboring states) prospered into the 15,000 or so thought to exist in Massachusetts today. They were fully situated in SE Massachusetts by the time of a 1996 study.

Remember, kids... you can run down and have one of them, or you can walk down and have EACH one of them.

This talk of turkey resettlement means little to you if you stay out of the forest, at least for most of the year. However, just like humans, turkeys get a bit sloppy during their mating season. This leads them out into your neighborhood, and potentially into your lives.

First of all, they are promiscuous. They are not monogamous... when business is concluded, Tom Turkey is raisin' up off the cot. Toms may mate with every hen in the area. Hens will mate several times a season, and egg incubation takes a bit less than a month.

Early batches of eggs only have a bout a 40% survival rate, primarily due to weather and egg/hen predation.  25-50% of hatchlings survive, with foxes, hawks and chilling spring rains offing the other offspring. Like many rural families, they have large families in hopes of having offspring succeed them.

This is why Tom Turkey is so busy about gettin' busy, folks. He has offspring odds to offset. Pimpin' ain't easy, as the rappers say.

This means that from March through May, the party is on in Turkeytown. Much like high school kids, they care little if business takes them into your yard. This leads to increased human-turkey interaction.

Turkeys got a bit cocky around Easter, as they aren't a major menu item for this holiday. He wouldn't be Doin' The Butt at my photographers in November, I can tell you that.

Turkeys live by a code known as the Pecking Order. Turkeys assign everyone in their lives a role in their pecking order, and this role usually involves attempts to assert dominance. Humans fit into this pecking order, and the turkey assigns a sex to a human based on his/her perception of the human's behavior. A "male" human may be challenged (or deferred to) by a tom and followed by a hen.

Being followed by hens is flattering in a way, but being challenged by a Tom is a bad thing. Turkeys can give out a painful peck, and one turkey attack victim described it leaping into the air and doing a dropkick-style move with the talons.

An adult human should be able to beat down even the angriest turkey, but it won't be a pretty fight and you're probably going to come out of it with some scars. A child or an old person may be less equipped to fight a large turkey.

Don't be afraid to stomp an aggressive turkey. It ends the immediate threat, and it teaches the other turkeys who the dominant primordial beast is. Turkeys are dumb enough to attack their own reflections (they are not thought to be self-aware), and one good smackdown is worth a hundred good arguments with that crowd. The sooner they learn it, the sooner they will regard humans as the turkey-sandwich-eating dominant species.

This might save them from a scenario where they would have to be "removed" from a neighborhood. They don't do trap-n-release with nuisance turkeys. Trapping methods used by hunters in the forest don't work on Elm Street in Suburbia, USA. Suburban turkeys who become a nuisance get the ol' Smith & Wesson haircut.

It takes a village of people beating down turkeys to make a positive change. Everyone has to do it, and they have to be consistent. If you get the neighborhood bully to go beat down the baddest bird, the turkeys will learn to fear just the bully, rather than humans in general. If the next human they see looks like a sucker, the turkey aggression begins anew. If they are chased from neighborhoods, it lowers the risk of human/turkey interaction.

S'up?

Two of my own photographers have suffered turkey attacks this April.

Jessica shot the bottom picture in the article when a flock of turkeys marched right through urban traffic and attacked her car. She informs me that it was very Hitchcockian, but they turkey fled in a minute when she pulled out some Stove Top.

In the picture just above, a turkey attacks the home of Cranberry County Magazine photographer Justin Thyme- who, in spite of her name, is actually a pretty girl. One can understand the turkey's motivation.

Unfortunately for this turkey, Justin has two Rottweilers named Fury and Wrath, they roam the yard from time to time, and they enjoy fresh poultry.

Nature is a cruel mistress, and one man's mommy might be another man's sandwich meat. Ideally, we'd each have our own realm to roam. However, as we noted earlier, the nation of Turkey is full of people...

Get Your Baby Chickens In Wareham

"Which came first, the chicken or the egg? I ate the chicken, and then I ate his leg."

We rolled deep into the TSC last week, to check the chicks. While "tractor store" wouldn't be the very last place I would look to buy chickens at (there is a strong farming connotation), it also isn't what you open the phone book to when you're looking for one. I'm not sure if getting your chickens at TSC is the same as getting pizza from a gas station, so I won't weigh in either way.

I don't farm much (I can't even grow weed), but it seems that the tractor would be the sworn enemy of little hard-to-see-from-the-tractor creatures who scurry around in the barnyard, such as the chicken.

TSC is in the Cranberry Plaza in Wareham, just off the fabulous Cranberry Highway. If you ain't there... you're somewhere else.

Cute little suckers, aren't they? I don't know enough about chickens to A) recommend raising some or B) tell you horror stories to keep you from doing so. I read "The Egg And I" once, that's about it. I'm not even sure what baby chickens are called, although I'm thinking "chicks."

I do know that, if you buy the wrong one- and the definition of "wrong" may be as simple and wide ranging as "male"- it'll be doing the old cock-a-doodle-doo for you every damn day at whatever hour the sun rises until you one day go outside and strangle it with your bare hands.

Life's too short for that sh*t, Hoss... even if you get free eggs.

They grow the dark meat chickens in their own little chicken ghetto, it seems...

Hey nowwwwwwwwwwww... I usually have to pull out the credit card for this kind of action.

99 cents is a damned cheap price for something that will grow up to either produce eggs or fill a dinner plate. I'm not sure how McNuggets are made, but it sure seems to me that these little fellows are about the same size and shape.

They are only selling chicks until a week after Easter, so be sure to hustle down and get clucked.

Fireball Explosion Above Kingston/Plymouth/Duxbury Area

This isn't the Plymouth Meteor, but it was close as we had to a picture of it.

Kingston is a quiet town, but- if the dice rolled a little differently- it could have been a Tunguska style disaster zone.

Chris Gloninger of NECN has reported that a meteor entered the Earth's atmosphere above the Kingston/Plymouth area. There was a fireball visible, and an explosion was audible. There were some social media complaints about an explosion at around 10 PM, although CCM is unaware of any pictures or video existing of it.

Reports of it came to me from Plymouth, Kingston, Plympton, Duxbury and- in one case involving a fisherman I know- Cape Cod Bay. People heard it as far away as Rockland. I have no idea of the path or where it exploded, although "just offshore' is my official wild guess. We are hearing reports that the explosion shook houses slightly.

Meteors enter the atmosphere all of the time. Several thousand enter our atmosphere every day. Many are the size of pebbles, but the friction entering the atmosphere causes great heat and a cool fireball effect. It may have been moving at 25,000 mph when it got over Kingston.

A 20 meter superbolide meteor made world news when it exploded over Russia and injured thousands in the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor impact. A kilometer-sized impact flattened 2000 square km of Russian wilderness in the 1908 Tunguska event. Last night's explosion was nothing near that.

I have no official confirmation, I am asking the NWS about it as I write this. There are no reports of damage and definitely no reports of any impact zone. This meteor may have been no bigger than a schnauzer, a far cry from the sort of Texas sized asteroid that we'd have to send Bruce Willis up to deal with.

We'll be back with an update if the need arises.

Right Whales Moving Into Cape Cod Bay

Massachusetts has rites of Spring, just like Iowa, Arkansas and Colorado do. Some of our rites involve whales coming for a visit at a certain time of year, just like they don't in Iowa.

North Atlantic Right Whales are entering our waters as we speak. They come in after plankton, using some primordial algorithm to know when the water temperature is just right to chow down on the microscopic organisms.

Right Whales are as rare as it gets, and are especially rare for both large whales and marine mammals in particular. There are only 500 left in the world. At the moment, 71 of those have been recorded as being in Cape Cod Bay as of Wednesday.

A mother and her calf were spotted in the Cape Cod Canal Tuesday, and another mom/baby were seen in Cape Cod Bay about halfway between Provincetown and Marshfield. Experts expect many more in the upcoming weeks.

 The whales cruise the surface, filtering tons of plankton into their tummies. They often work very close to shore, and are visible to beachwalkers. Set up on a cliff (Manomet, Cedarville, Scituate, Saquish) if you can, height always helps when spotting. It involves more "getting lucky" than me getting laid, but even a bad day staring at the ocean is better than most good days.

It goes without saying that you shouldn't hassle these whales. They are very rare. Boats are required by law to keep a few hundred yards between them and any righty. A collision between a whale and a boat could take an endangered species off of the charts.

It's also good sense for the mariner. Look at how things ended for Captain Ahab, Quint, Joshua, Samuel L. Jackson... you don't want to mess with anything that can fit you in their mouth.

Flooded Cranberry Highway Impassable In Spots

Route 6/28 through Wareham, aka The Cranberry Highway, is impassable for all but the highest-profile of vehicles.

Drenching rains are pouring down on the 'Ham, and the area in front of the old 99 is an urban river.

This is the second time this week that the Cran has been too flooded to drive through. Any good rain does it these days.

Note that this is a major evacuation route for Buzzards Bay and Wareham, especially Onset, in the event of a hurricane. You'll want to get ghost early if your evacuation plans include East Wareham,

We'll be back if an update is necessary.

Click the "East Wareham" link at the bottom of the article for the map location of the flooded road.

Vampire Panic In New England

New England is home to Harvard, Hawthorne and a lot of US Presidents. We have intellectual stripes that few states can match.

We also would blame tuberculosis deaths on vampires and desecrate corpses to kill them now and then.

New England had a period running from 1784 through 1949 where 80 bodies were exhumed from graves to be treated as vampires. Various folk-remedy methods of vampire extermination were utilized.

This wasn't medieval stuff... a vampire was exhumed in Rhode Island about 20 years before Ronald Reagan was born, not too long before the Wright Brothers got an airplane off the ground. This was 200 years after the Salem Witch Trials. People were living during that exhumation who, in the same life, watched a moon landing on TV.

What's up with these people? What's the dilly? As you might imagine, several factors were at work.

Understand that the Internet sucked in 1892, with "sucked" meaning "didn't exist." Literacy, while on the upswing from near-zero in feudal times, was still a rare thing, especially in rural communities. The newest medical journals were slow to get to western Rhode Island farms. Doctors were rare, many were quacks, and even President McKinley had a doctor check a bullet wound by sticking a finger in his abdomen and poking around... in 1901.

If educated city-folk were that dangerous, you can imagine how much damage a farmer could do when faced with a disease or infection that he had no idea about.

Tuberculosis was only really figured out recently, and doctors would just throw up their hands when they saw it in 1892.  Their cures were often worse than the illness- Doc Holliday was sent to a sulfur spring to treat his tuberculosis in 1887.

Rhode Island farmers had even less understanding of tuberculosis, which they referred to as "consumption." The name was fitting. A person with tuberculosis would lose weight, become pallid, refuse to eat, fear light, labor to breathe... they wasted away before your eyes. It would also tear through families, many of whom were piled 8 deep in a house and sharing one bed.

While a doctor might recognize this as tuberculosis, a farmer would have a different diagnosis set. It might include the spirit of a deceased relative leaving the grave and feeding on the life energy of their surviving family.

Belief in vampirism goes back to Mesopotamia, and was still in effect in many parts of the world by 1892. This was before Bela Lugosi and Twilight, so no one thought of a vampire resembling a Hungarian count or a pouting teenage boy. When it wasn't being described as a sort of energy force, a vampire was viewed as more corpse-like than a Brad Pitt-looking fellow.

While a diagnosis of vampirism might get you laughed out of Tufts, an illiterate farmer might think that it sounds as good as whatever the city slicker was telling them. You have a definite cause-and-effect thing working, always valuable to a man playing doctor who can't read. A diagnosis of tuberculosis requires medical knowledge and intense examination. All you need for a Vampirism diagnosis is for the TB to run through the rest of your family.

Consumption happened a lot in rural communities. It was the leading cause of death in the northeast in the 1800s. To their credit, most farmers recognized it as a natural illness without paranormal overtones. That's why farm families crank out so many kids. Children are Labor, and even Dowry. They are also vulnerable, which is why many farmers banged out 12 kids in hope that 5 would survive to run the farm.

However, historians have uncovered at least 80 instances where corpses were exhumed and desecrated because someone thought that they were vampires.

Cases run from Maine to Minnesota , but New England holds the title. We do have places like Yale and enlightened cities like Boston, but we also had many areas chock full of susperstitious farmers.

We are also heavy-handed with the punishment. We performed the first legal execution of a juvenile in America... for Bestiality, I believe.

That tendency towards draconian superstition, much of it brought over from Europe, gave New England the title belt with both Witchcraft and Vampirism.

There's a good reason why Shirley Jackson didn't set The Lottery in Manhattan, and why Stephen King set Salem's Lot in Maine. The stories work here.

A relatively isolated area in Rhode Island and Connecticut could do a pretty good Salem's Lot impression, as a great % of the recorded Vampire exhumations went down there.

You can't blame them totally- there was a prominent exhumation in Vermont in 1817, Thoreau wrote about one in 1859  and even America's Hometown of Plymouth has someone buried face down to prevent them from being able to dig their way out of a grave- but they were into it the most.

A newspaper from Connecticut in 1784 denounced exhumations. The Tillinghast family of Exeter, which saw consumption run through it after the father's 1790s dream of a blight killing half of his orchard, lost half of their children even though they exhumed 17 year old Sarah and did a ritual. Jewett City, Connecticut, Saco, Maine (15 miles from where Salem's Lot was based), Loudon, New Hampshire, Belchertown, Massachusetts, Woodstock, Vermont, Cumberland, Rhode Island, Manchester, Vermont and Griswold, Connecticut- among dozens of other New England communities- went all Buffy on someone in the course of their histories.

Exeter, if not the epicenter of the vampire craze, serves as the main neighborhood. They acted like Serbian gypsies. They also are notable for their brutal exhumation techniques, their near Reagan era survival of vampire superstition and for being the home of America's vampire queen.

Mercy Brown, pictured below, is the most famous of the 80 recorded cases where a vampire-themed exhumation went on.

Mercy was one of an unfortunate group of children that George and Mary Brown bore. George was a farmer living a hard life working a rocky Rhodey homestead. The consumption came for his family, taking Ma Brown in 1893 and a daughter the next year. The mother and daughter were Mary and Mary Olive. There was also a sister named Mercy Lena.

Mercy fell sick and died in 1892. Then her brother Edwin fell sick. This set off a superstition algorithm involving multiple consumption deaths in the same family equaling undead predation.

That was enough for the villagers. Perhaps fearing that Mercy would move on to their own families after polishing off the Brown blood bank, several locals- after a vote- approached George with a folk remedy. It may have been the last conversation of the Dark Ages.

Although he gave his permission, George was not in attendance when a Frankenstein-style mob moved on the crypt that held the remains of Mercy Brown. Distinct among the group, which was most likely smaller than a mob, were a wildly protesting doctor and a Providence Journal reporter.

Mercy was a winter death, and she was stored in the above-ground crypt that we have a picture of somewhere in this article. She was kept this way until the ground thawed enough for a burial. You should note that her crypt was very much similar to how they stored ice back then.

They checked the coffins of all the Brown women. Two of them were Corpsing along as they should have been. Mercy was a whole other story.

Mercy didn't look that bad for a corpse. The cold had preserved her well. They cracked open her chest and cut out her heart. It still had blood in it. Bingo! We got us a vampire!

Since this was 5 years before Dracula was written (Bram Stoker had an article about the Brown exhumation among his papers, and may have based Lucy Westerna on Mercy Brown), the people- who only acted like Serbians, and didn't actually use Serbian words like vampyr- probably just called her Mercy or Lena... especially around George, who most likely had to be handled diplomatically.

Vampire slaying methodology varied from region to region. Both Plymouth and Maine, connected by maritime trade, favored burying the corpse face down. Vermont was more brutal, and their methods spread down the Connecticut River into eastern Connecticut and western Rhode Island.

Mercy's heart was placed on a nearby stone and cooked to a cinder. The ashes were then fed to her ailing brother, most likely in a tea. It worked so well, he was dead in two months, and is buried next to the sister that he consumed.

Opinions vary as to whether it was effective. The doctor pointed out that Mercy's lungs showed tuberculosis. He no doubt spoke up when the remedy failed to cure Edwin. The locals pointed out that no Browns got sick after Edwin.

Michael Bell, the authority on such matters, says that exhumations occurred in America until the mid 20th Century. The last one Bell is aware of went down in the Pennsylvania mountains in 1949. A construction crew in Griswold, CT dug up an ancient cemetery in 1990. One of the graves had been broken into. The corpse was beheaded, the heart was torn out and the legs were broken off. The damage was done 5 years after death.

Mercy wasn't the last one, but is the most famous one. Her desecration got national publicity, all negative, and western Rhode Islanders were known as superstitious and "vicious" by neighboring communities, with the Boston Globe suggesting inbreeding as a cause for the vampire panic.

We checked out her grave recently, as one of our road trips took us into that Rhodey/CT midst. Route 95 goes through there now, and Exeter is a charming bedroom suburb of Providence. You can still see the Old Days if you poke around some.

Late Season Snow Information

Late-season snow facts:

- According to WBZ, Boston has had snowfall of 12 inches or more after March 20th once, in 1997. More on that in a sec.  Boston has 6 instances where 6 or more inches of snow fell after March 20th. Worcester has had 12 such events.

- Spring starts at 12:30 AM this Sunday, March 20th.

- The average date of Boston's last snowfall is March 25th.

- The latest measurable snowfall for Boston was a half inch on May 10th, 1977. The latest we've had non-accumulating snow in Boston was June 10th, 1955.

- This source tells me that New York and Atlanta both have the same day, in different years, for latest snowfall... April 25th.

- Most of New England had frost on August 23rd in 1816, and lake ice was seen around the Bay State into August.. This was due to the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, which gave everyone red, smoky skies and drove worldwide temperatures down. New England had her corn crop fail, and all sorts of food prices skyrocketed. June snow fell in some parts of New England. It is known as The Year Without A Summer. They had one period where it went from 95 degrees to 35 degrees in a half day.

- Three late-season snowstorms stand out in our history. One was that May 10th, 1977 one from The Farmer's Almanac. The record is a bit later in the year for the Berkshires. The other late-season trace snow events of note in our history are the ones I was yapping about up above.

- Our second storm of note was the 1997 April Fool's Day Blizzard. Over 25 inches of snow fell on Boston, and coastal flooding tore apart the shoreline.

- Our third late-season storm of note was a 17-21 inch blockbuster that hit Worcester and areas north on April 28th, 1987.

I was a freshman at Worcester State College for that storm, and had just picked up a girl from West Boylston High School for a date... because that's how I rolled in 1987, playboy! We went to a movie, came out, and there were 6 inches of snow on the ground. We had an Italian dinner somewhere, and there was a foot on the ground when we came out of the restaurant.

I had only been driving for a year, and had zero savvy. We nearly hit a plow when we skidded all the way down a hill on Route 9. We also drove into a drift in some guy's yard in Berlin, Massachusetts. It ended well... the homeowner called his sons out to shove my car from the drift, and they came out single file... and each one was bigger than the last. "Don't worry about it, just steer" is how the father replied when I offered to make Katie drive so that I could get out and help shove the car. They literally lifted my car and threw it from the drift.

I got zero (0) play from that date, too. The only time I even got a hug as when we nearly crashed into the plow, and that may have been a case where she was trying to wrestle me into a position where the plow blade hit me first. I really can't blame her.

Anyhow, 17 inches of snow is about as much as we get that late in the year. If you get snow on your lawn after May 10th, you just saw a regional record.

Our own March Madness brackets for Worst Massachusetts Storm Ever

1) 1938 Great New England Hurricane

2) 1635 Great Colonial Hurricane

3) Blizzard of '78

4) Hurricane Bob, 1991

5) Worcester Tornado, 1953

6) Halloween Gale, 1991

7) Blizzard of 1888

8) 1898 Portland Gale

9) April Fool's Blizzard, 1997

10) Hurricane Carol/Edna, 1954

11)  Hurricane Donna, 1960

12) The Great September Gale Of 1815

13)  Winter of 2015

14) 1944 Great Atlantic Hurricane

15) The Triple Storms of 1839

16) Blizzard of 2005


Lower Seeds:

2008 Ice Storm

1698, reported 42 inches of snow in Cambridge

1831 Snowstorm, 3 feet on the Cape

1978 pre-Blizzard January snowstorm

2011 Springfield Tornado

Blizzard of 2013

1993 Superstorm

Saxby Gale, 1869

1969 100 Hour Storm

Winter of 1717

1996 South Shore microburst

Hurricane Belle

Hurricane Gloria

Hurricane Irene

Hurricane Sandy/Post-Sandy Wareham microburst

1960 snowstorm