About once a week, we get visited by members of our local tribe of wandering Wild Turkeys. Their number varies from a pair to more than a dozen. They like to chortle and graze in the wild growth of our sloping North Field. They seem to know that they are hard to see there at this time of the year, when both the field and they are a bit dingy.
On Sunday (August 30), I was hidden at the base of that hill watching a quartet of them shuffle through the field with nibbling and snapping heads down – until they heard the click of my camera, even though it was on “quiet” mode.
As you can see above, all four heads came up immediately, necks were extended, and eyes and ears searched while bodies remained still.
In the next second, they saw me in my hiding place and flew away rather than use their usual running mode:
Turkeys reportedly can see in the day three times better than humans. (They don’t see well at night.) Turkeys also have acute hearing, even though they have bare ear holes without any surrounding structure to concentrate sound waves. Test data indicate that they hear more distant and lower frequency sounds than humans. (Brooklin, Maine)