It was a very cold, cloudy day here on the East End … the kind of day I like to stay inside by the fire. It felt like snow and, I guess my “wild-friends” thought so too because, outside, there was a flurry of activity.

The resident robins, with their dusky red breasts not yet bright, came from their hiding places in the woods and devoured the purple berries on my callicarpa bushes. They haven’t as yet started on the holly berries or the cotoneaster berries.

A large raucous flock of bluejays mobbed the sunflower seed feeders and the cracked corn bowls. Their beautiful blue plumage brightened a gray day.

The crows here are the biggest I’ve ever seen. I believe they call to me for scraps of food. They look directly into my windows and yell and then wait for me to come out and put some leftovers in the woods for them. As soon as I head back towards the house, they fly down from the trees for their dinner.

Two large bucks ran quietly along the railroad tracks that abut the edges of my woods, their white tails held high.

The turkey “family” returned after an absence of a few weeks. They were maturing and I had to laugh at myself … You would think that, after raising three boys, I would have known, by their raucous behavior, that the turkey “family” I was nurturing, amid dreams of baby turkeys cavorting in my garden, was not a family at all but a group of “young studs”!

There were so many little birds in my garden … wrens, tufted titmice, red-breasted nuthatches, juncos, chickadees, sparrows and woodpeckers … they were zooming around at top speed, filling up, I guess, before the snow fell.

And the squirrels were so funny, climbing, jumping, performing like the dare-devil acrobats they are. I watched one test the ice that had formed on my pond and then decide to take his drink of water in a safer spot - a little nearer to the waterfall … pretty smart little guy!

A little snow fell … just enough to be pretty … just enough to give my pond a sparkly coating … and just enough make my wintry garden look like a fairyland.

It is so very beautiful here on the East End of Long Island. I wake up every morning happy to be alive, thrilled to hear the magnificent songs of birds of all feathers, sizes and shapes. Before I feed Misty and Pablo, and before I even have my first cup of coffee, I fill the cracked corn dish on my front woodland path for the turkey family that visits several times each day. How exciting to watch them. How good to know that their reintroduction to the South Fork of the Island was successful and they are not only thriving but enjoying their breakfast on my front lawn!

I write a social column, “From Fourth Neck” for the Southampton Press and, from time to time, I do additional pieces for “The Press Box.”

The PRESS BOX
Wild Turkeys
By Maria Daddino

Early morning might be my favorite time of day, but this is ridiculous! It’s dark and cold. And here I am stumbling around on my front lawn, in my nightgown and robe, heading into the woods with a bucket of cracked corn.

Didn’t I make a promise to myself that I would never do this again?

I thought back to the blizzard of 1996, when, in the middle of that storm that dumped more than 2 feet of snow, I wandered around my backyard looking for my wild ducks. When I finally found them, they looked at me wide-eyed with disbelief. They had a “What is this crazy lady doing out in this blizzard?” type of look. They weren’t even hungry and were, seemingly, warm and cozy in their own little igloos, sheltered underneath the huge miscanthus grasses that I had planted by the dock.

As I trudged back up the hill, my arthritic knees buckling and giving way now and then in the deepening snow, I just hoped that I wouldn’t fall. No one knew that I was outside, and I didn’t think to take my cell phone with me. I could just imagine my kids sadly shaking their heads as they read the headlines: “Duck lady found frozen in the snow”!

After that debacle, didn’t I swear that I would never ever again be “enslaved” by any little creature, be it furry or feathered? This time, though, it all started rather innocently. It was August when I heard strange but somewhat familiar sounds—sounds that I just couldn’t place. Could it be “gobble, gobble” that I was hearing? Sure enough, when I looked out my window, two families of turkeys—two mothers with eight offspring of assorted personalities and sizes—were patrolling my back garden. I was thrilled.

What made my visitors extra special was that I had closely followed the story of their reintroduction to Long Island. By the early 1900s, the eastern wild turkey had all but disappeared from Long Island and, in fact, from the entire Northeast. In 1993, turkeys were reintroduced here and, like most of our East End visitors, they evidently loved the amenities of our Hamptons lifestyle.

Contrary to the critics of the reintroduction program, the turkeys made themselves right at home, thriving in our oak forests and dining upon such delicacies as acorns, nuts, grain, mice, shrews, insects, and sometimes even gypsy moths and ticks.

To have these special visitors coming daily to my garden for breakfast and dinner was an awesome experience. I imagined them walking and flying for miles just to get to “Maria’s 1-acre nature preserve.” I did my best to make them feel right at home.

Turkeys sleep high up in the trees and come down just after first light for breakfast. By that time, the deer have eaten all the cracked corn. And that’s how I came to find myself, in the pre-dawn hours on an early fall morning, tramping through my woods preparing breakfast for a family of five turkeys.

A few weeks have passed since that cold October morning and today, as I walked into my woods with my bucket filled to the brim with cracked corn—after all, it is Thanksgiving Day for “everyone,” and not just people—I reflected on the meaning, to me, of this most special holiday.

My dinner table will be overflowing with the bounty of our wonderful East End farms. My grandchildren’s big brown eyes will be sparkling with excitement when they see the great big turkey that will be the centerpiece of our Thanksgiving dinner. I will be surrounded by those I cherish and who are most dear to me.

And as we all bow our heads in appreciation of the abundant blessings we have received from above, I will be most thankful for family and friends, health and happiness, and for the very special turkey, the symbol of a plentiful harvest, that graces my table and feeds my loved ones.

I will also be profoundly grateful for the endearing little turkey family whose wild beauty fills my heart and whose very presence nourishes my soul.

Maria Daddino writes the “From Fourth Neck” social column for The Southampton Press Western Edition