Posted on 03/04/2005 9:44:08 AM PST by Shermy
A surprisingly resilient wild turkey downed power lines in Tomales last week, causing a four-hour blackout. The turkey, by all indications, is still alive and at large.
Tomales residents Margaret Graham and Walter Earle were drinking tea and reading the paper shortly before 6:45 a.m. last Friday in their home when they were startled by a loud explosion and brilliant flash of light from outside their window.
Running outside, they discovered three downed power lines and a dazed-looking turkey walking in circles on Hwy 1.
The couple watched as the turkey ambled into the field across the road from their house, disappearing into the brush.
"He could have had a heart attack later on in that field," Graham said. "But I don’t know. There were some feathers in the road, but they didn’t look burnt."
Earle immediately reported the downed powerlines to the Tomales firehouse.
"Some turkeys just took out the power lines," he recalled saying. Fire Captain Tom Nunes of Tomales told The Light that he assumed at the time that Earle was referring to drunk drivers, rather than birds.
Turkey appeared unscathed, 825 lose power
Arriving on the scene, Nunes and a crew of volunteer firefighters were baffled to find a mysterious scattering of feathers, but no turkey. After a search of the area yielded no dead or dying birds, Nunes could only confirm that the turkey had somehow survived a head-on collision with a 12,000-volt power line.
"You’d think where the power line broke there’d be a fried bird or something," Nunes said. "But we couldn’t find remnants or anything."
The jolt of electricity administered to other birds – such as turkey vultures – that more commonly touch live power lines is so strong that the birds typically burst into flames, Nunes said. In one such accident, in the summer of 1998, a flaming buzzard actually ignited a 2.5-acre grass fire along Old Rancheria Road in Nicasio.
Eight hundred and twenty-five households and businesses initially lost power when the blackout began at 6:45 a.m. Six hundred and twenty-two had their power back on by 8 a.m. Everyone had their lights back on by 10:15 a.m., spokesman Lloyd Coker of PG&E said.
Coker noted that he’d never heard of a bird surviving a brush with power lines, and he could recall only one instance when a wild turkey had flown into a power line, about eight years ago in Sebastopol.
"I certainly wouldn’t say it’s a common occurrence," he added.
The scarcity of such incidents is no surprise, since wild turkeys can only fly over distances of several feet, when they fly at all.
"They don’t fly all that well, so we’ve had no cases of turkeys hitting the power lines," Nunes said.
At the site of last week’s mishap, however, a steep hillside serves as a launching pad for the birds, which can float, frantically flapping their wings, to the field across the road.
Graham said she and her husband had often witnessed the birds in their short bursts of flight across the highway.
"They start up on the hillside and kind of fly across," she said. "If they do it right, they can just make it to the field, which is lower."
While Graham said of the turkey’s hit-and-run on Tomales’ electrical grid that she had "never seen anything like it before," it was not the first time she and her husband had suffered the depredations of the strangely aggressive birds. Once, she recalled, a wild turkey charged into her parked car for no apparent reason, smashing the car’s taillight and dying instantly.
One of the volunteer firefighters called to the scene had his own tale of the turkeys’ bizarre knack for cheating death. Years ago, the volunteer told Fire Chief Nunes, who relayed the story to the Light, he was driving on Sir Francis Drake Blvd. when a wild turkey flew in front of him. Unable to swerve, he struck the bird at about 50 mph. The force of the blow cracked his windshield. When he pulled over, however, the turkey was nowhere to be found.
"It spooked the hell out of him," Nunes said. "There was no dead turkey."
The turkeys began to wear out their welcome when a flock took up residence in a stand of eucalyptus trees west of Tomales in 2000 (the birds are still there, and the trees where they roost are not far from the place where the power lines fell).
The birds became more and more brazen in their interactions with townsfolk, scratching up gardens, climbing over parked cars, and clucking aggressively at children in the street. Tensions came to a head in Jan. 2001, when two male turkeys (called "toms" or "gobblers") lunged at a pair of schoolchildren on their scooters in an apparent attack. The children escaped unharmed, but were forced to leave their vehicles behind to be gloated over by the strutting toms.
That headline wrote itself.
I thought this was goiing to be frat-party story...
Could have just as easilly been an immigrant named Jose Quervo or a good ole boy named Jack Daniels.
mmm...tasty.
For a minute I thought it was a Hunter Thompson thread.
I have seen this happen. Oh you mean the bird never mind.
Bad birdie! No cornmeal for you! :-)
Evolution strikes again. Self-roasting turkeys would become extinct.
When you're driving down the highway at night
And you're feelin' that wild turkey's bite
Don't give Johnny Walker a ride
Cause Jack Black is right by your side
You might get taken to the jailhouse and find
You've been arrested for driving while blind
Now just the other night with nothin' to do
We broke a case of proof 102
And started itchin' for that wonderful feel
Of rollin' in an automobile
You could say we was out of our mind
And let me tell you we were flyin' while blind
Then they had us up against the wall
Hey it's only blood grain alcohol
And there ain't no cause for alarm
We ain't out to do nobody no harm
How could anyone be so unkind
To arrest a man for drivin' while blind
Turkeys is one tough son-of-a-bird! My fil shot one with a 12 gauge from about 15 yards, knocked it off it's feet, it got up, shook itself off, and ran away!
So9
I thought it was going to be a story about a wild and tasty bird hitting a power line. I just must not be very imaginative today.
Jack Daniels will do that, too. (Or so I've been told)
Well.....Wild Turkey has come close to cauing blackouts for me
Nothing like a twenty pound bird brain bomb flying into vehicles, power lines, telephone lines and your plants.
Last November, I was returning home from a fly fishing trip at the end of the day on a curvy country road. Suddenly I had an aggressive driver in a new Ford F350 on my tailgate, and I had no place to pull off.
I rounded a curve and a flock of turkeys just missed my vehicle and flew into the aggressive tailgater. His windshield was shattered, he had wounded birds entangled on the rack on his roof, and birds were impaled in the open places of the front of his truck. The entire right side of his vehicle looked someone had lobbed turkey cannonballs at it.
As I rounded the curve, I waved goodby to the gobbler attracting tailgater. The good thing for the tailgater was the birds had sacrificed themselves in time for Thanksgiving.
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