13 degrees at 8 p.m. Partly cloudy.
Sun rises at 7:09 and sets at 7:13.
Wind from the southwest at 22 km/hr.
Moon a waxing crescent at 16 % of full.
And it's way too warm. Spring is about three weeks earlier than usual. Three weeks! Normal temperatures for this date are +4 and -7 but tonight it will be +1. But- how we all enjoy it! Suddenly the birds are back; robins, cardinals, grackles, little nuthatches, the ubiquitous chickadees. Goldfinches, not yet gold, swoop in and hang upside down on the feeder, eating niger seed. Redwings perch on cat-tails calling out for brides. A pair of downy woodpeckers echo each others tappings. A flock of five wild turkeys strutted past for two mornings this week, they look very determined indeed but probably aren't.
Wild turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo) are native to North America, it turns out. And I learn from Wikipedia that, like other gamebirds, they exhibit strong sexual dimorphism. That just means that males are different from females. They are quite a bit larger, for one thing, and their feathers have red, purple, green, copper, bronze, and gold iridescence, while the females are dull brown and grey, poor things. Parasites can dull the colours, though. Turkeys have 5000 to 6000 feathers, apparently, I wonder who counted? They can fly quite well, if not far and are omniverous- nuts, berries and the occasional small reptile. Males can make a drumming sound using air sacks in their chests, females yelp.
Males are polygamous- and this is interesting- they court in pairs or groups with members of the group being close relatives and sharing more than half of their genetic material. (The image was taken from Wikipedia under a Creative Commons license, author is Sasha Kopf)
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