Tapirtype Blog: Photography

This morning, as I was waiting for the T, I saw a turkey. It was scrounging around the plants in the islands that run down the center of Beacon Street, right next to the trolley stop like it was waiting for a train to arrive.

At first, I thought I was hallucinating, but it was right there, about three feet away from me.

A Russian guy started throwing it bread crumbs. I asked, “Is that your turkey?” He said, “No, it is just hun-ga-ry!” I really, really wanted to reply, “No, it’s not Hungary, it’s Turkey!”

Synagogue was just getting out across the street, and a bunch of people who came out walked by and said they’d seen turkeys around a bunch lately. When I got on the T, I warned the driver to watch out for the turkey near the tracks. “Oh, is that guy still around?” the driver laughed.

I ran home to get my camera, and when I got back to the trolley stop, the turkey wasn’t in the island anymore. I walked up and down the road looking for it, and I finally spotted it on the side of the street, standing on the steps of an apartment building like it wanted to get in. It let me get very close to it to take pictures, even after I shooed it away briefly to let a woman get through the door with her dog.

As people walked by, about half of them had seen turkeys in the neighborhood before. They mostly hang out a couple blocks down at Washington Square, which is an even busier intersection than where this one was. Apparently one of them routinely chills in front of kosher Dunkin Donuts down the street early in the morning. (Yes, there is a kosher Dunkin Donuts in my neighborhood.)

The turkeys have been causing some trouble around Brookline, because they can be pretty aggressive. One jogger warned me, “Stay away from him, he’s mean!” That series of tubes we call the internets has reports of small children being attacked by turkeys on the way home from school, Brookline homemakers having to fend them off with brooms, etc. This one was very docile, though. It just tooled around in front of the apartment building for a while, then let me chaperone it around the corner and up a side street. It occasionally gobbled softly and ruffled its feathers to get the rain off.

I put up more pictures of the turkey on Flickr.