Posted on 05/23/2003 7:41:23 PM PDT by Pharmboy
Art Lindenauer
A female turkey visiting a 28th-floor
balcony on West 70th Street on
April 20. She appears to be the first of
her kind to make a go of it in
Manhattan's parks and airways.
Much about this bird is a mystery.
For starters, why did it take flight over Manhattan? Where did it come from? Is it alone?
One thing is clear.
"It's definitely a wild turkey," said E. J. McAdams, executive director of New York City Audubon, which has documented sightings of the bird from the Upper West Side to Chelsea and Greenwich Village since February. "And it's a talented turkey at that."
Several other witnesses, lacking Mr. McAdams's ornithological insight, have been just as impressed.
"The thing scared me to death," said Art Lindenauer, a retired chemical engineer who encountered the turkey in April on the balcony of his 28th-floor apartment on West 70th Street. Mr. Lindenauer has photographs of the turkey at rest, walking along the balcony railing, and taking flight.
By all accounts, the wild turkey sightings apparently are a first in the center of Manhattan. Few species would seem less likely inhabitants of an urban core, considering the wild turkey's ungainly size, its native habitat in woods, mountains and swamps, and its diet of berries, nuts and insects.
But its arrival is not altogether surprising, given that birds and animals have been making their way into densely populated areas across the nation.
A coyote was found in Central Park in 1999, not far from where a pair of red-tailed hawks have nested on a luxury apartment building at Fifth Avenue and 74th Street. Bears, not yet spotted in Manhattan, have been spotted in the suburbs, feeding from garbage cans and lumbering across yards.
Wild turkeys, long a beguiling sight along back roads and stone walls in the country, have been moving steadily to the suburbs and the fringes of the boroughs.
Several have been spotted in recent years in Pelham Bay Park, in the Bronx Zoo, on Staten Island and in Inwood Hill Park at the northern tip of Manhattan.
The turkey that has been spotted this year in Manhattan is clearly a female: she is smaller and less colorful than a male and lacks a male's wattles.
"The population all around is so healthy, I would not be surprised to see one or two turkeys wander into Manhattan each year," said Greg Butcher, an ornithologist and director of citizen science for the National Audubon Society. "Turkeys are going to want woods and fields, and New York City parks provide them," he said, "but I would be surprised to see a self-sustaining population in Manhattan."
Not everyone is convinced that a wild turkey could find its way into the center of Manhattan on its own.
"If it's real, I'd say it was assisted into the city by some person," said Stephanie Easter, director of dispatch for the city's Center for Animal Care and Control, which rescues injured animals and birds.
"We've never seen one in Manhattan," she said, "and I don't think the average person in this city knows what a wild turkey looks like."
John Rowden, the curator of animals at the Central Park Zoo, said that no one had yet reported a wild turkey in his park but that recent sightings in the Bronx and Inwood might explain how one or more was spotted near the Hudson River on the West Side.
"Turkeys are not great dispersers or fliers," he said, adding that they rarely range much over 12 miles. Even their limited flying abilities would allow turkeys to cross the narrow expanse of the Harlem River from the Bronx, find their way to the Hudson and migrate down its shoreline, he said.
That appears to fit the pattern. Mr. McAdams, of the city's Audubon Society chapter, said the first two sightings were in February and mid-April, when what seems to have been the same bird was spotted trotting in the West 60's between West End Avenue and the West Side Drive.
Then, on April 20, came Mr. Lindenauer's encounter on his 28th-floor balcony, in the Lincoln Towers apartment complex, just off West End Avenue. He said he spotted the turkey leaning against his living room window, as if she were taking a nap.
Mr. Lindenauer, who was at home with his wife, Jinx, a sculptor, said he tapped on the window to get the turkey's attention. The bird stood up reluctantly, he said, and walked along the railing, posing for photographs for 15 minutes or so before she took off.
That episode has mystified bird experts, who say turkeys have not been known to fly as high as the 28th floor.
"They are not vertical fliers," said Mr. Butcher, the ornithologist. "You will see them maybe 20 feet up in trees, but not 100 feet. I'd say that turkey went up an elevator."
Mr. Lindenauer insisted that the turkey was not planted on his balcony. Mr. McAdams said she could have made her way to the 28th floor by flying up from balcony to balcony, like an elevator making all the stops.
The next recorded sighting, by a reporter, was on May 7, when a female wild turkey roosted quietly in the upper branches of a London plane tree in front of an elegant row of landmark-district brownstones on West 21st Street, between 9th and 10th Avenues.
During the next few days, the turkey became a familiar sight on nearby Chelsea blocks.
"Lots of us saw it," said Lenny Kesselman, owner of the London True Value Hardware store on Ninth Avenue near 22nd Street.
The turkey gave her longest performance on May 8 on the lush grounds of the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church, which fill the block bounded by 9th and 10th Avenues and 20th and 21st Streets.
Toni Daniels, the seminary's director of enrollment management, said she saw the turkey standing outside her office window early that morning. "A faculty member came in saying it must be a buzzard, and I thought it was a peahen," she recalled.
Before long, the bird was identified by seminarians from the South who had seen turkeys at home.
"It just strutted around here for three or four hours, then flew over the wall and was gone," Ms. Daniels said. Her colleagues started referring to the turkey as Glorvina, after Glorvina Rossell Hoffman, a particularly generous seminary benefactor in the 1800's.
In the most recent sighting, Mr. McAdams said he saw what he believed to be the same turkey on Monday in Greenwich Village. She was roosting casually on top of a garage on Barrow Street, between Washington and West Streets, he said.
Back on the Upper West Side, Mr. Lindenauer said he held little hope of a return visit. But he has named his balcony, instead of the bird, in honor of the April 20 encounter. The question is whether he did so while thinking of Thanksgiving.
"I've decided," he said, "to call it the Butterball Roost."
I'm inclined to agree. Not because I don't think it's possible, there's a lot more wildlife thriving in human habitat than The Nature Company would like to admit; but this bird seems to be spending a lot of time sitting and walking around close to people - on balconies and the like. Turkey in the wild scatter pretty quickly at the sight of people. I would think a wild turkey would be pretty skittish just from all the sights and sounds in a city, let alone all the people. My guess it that it was caught as a chick, raised by people, then escaped or was let go, explaining why it's comfortable knowing people are looking at it.
Not me The Coyote is a very ubiquitous animal with very few natural enemies and an omnivorous diet. We have them in every county in Maryland now and housepets are disappearing like Swedish Meatballs at a wedding reception (Unfortunate analogy alert!)
Coyotes have also been seen in the North Bronx in New York. They are nocturnal, sly and very mobile.
Regards,
I wouldn't be suprised. Right across the Hudson River, in Hudson County, we have a population of pheasant, herons, and egrets. I never know what's going to turn up next.
I was railroaded!
Arthur C. Carlson
Station Manager, WKRP
(Tell my mother, I was right)
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