May 11th, 2020


Ffftht! Ffftht!

It's "fuzz" season on the bikepath, which is to say that the cottonwoods are in bloom.\o? I always expect to either get one of those tufts of fuzz in a nostril or (worse yet) to accidentally inhale one. Ughhhh. It hasn't ramped up to its full threat level yet, but soon.

It's also turklet season! I came across some last weekend on a bike ride, where the mother was herding them from the bike path into the bushes... and then back the other way, for random turkey reasons. And then yesterday, while out hiking, our son and I came across a whole bunch on a hiking trail near the bike path. We had to leave the trail and rejoin the pavement, in fact, because one of the turklets kept running away down the trail and got so far from where it started out that we were afraid its mother would never be able to herd it back home.

These aren't my pictures, but this is what they look like at this young age. These turkey babies have coloring similar to ducklings:

They grow pretty quickly, so they aren't cute for very long. Soon, they become adolescents and they start to look like this, as in "What the hell is that thing on your face?"

For the males, that bump grows longer and redder and pointier until it starts to droop and becomes the snood:

And then eventually it reaches longer, more impressive/disgusting manifestations such as this, where apparently female turkeys think "Oh, my! Look at that handsome fellow!" and humans think "Gah, we're basically looking at vultures with neck tumors and epic skin tags":

You're probably wishing you could unsee the quasi-testicular horror-show of that last picture, aren't you? :O