210 



THE AMERICAN POULTERER'S COMPANION. 



ones was needed for ' Thanksgiving,' and the re- 

 maining two I kept through the winter. About 

 the time for the hen to commence laying I killed 

 the cock, to prevent too much conversation and 

 intimacy with distant flocks. That year I raised 

 eight young ones, and they seemed to have made 

 considerable progress toward becoming domes- 

 ticated. 



" Last year I kept over two hens and a male 

 bird, and in the spring they both laid near the 

 house, one of them under a bush in the garden, 

 and the other in the barn. The one in the gar- 

 den laid her third egg on the morning after the 

 last snow that season, which was, I believe, the 

 last of March or fore part of April. I discov- 

 ered her nest by the tracks in the snow. Sup- 

 posing the first two eggs were injured by the 

 cold, I left them in the nest, and removed the 

 succeeding ones from day to day until I had 

 taken out sixteen, when she began to sit. I 

 then removed the two eggs and placed the six- 

 teen in the nest, adding also one from the nest 

 of the other turkey. The other turkey sat on 

 fourteen eggs and hatched out twelve; only 

 one, however, proved to be rotten, the other 

 was broken in consequence of the nest being 

 too dishing. I did not remove the eggs from 

 this nest as they were laid. I placed the old 

 turkeys in coops near to each other, and conse- 

 quently I can not say how many of each brood 

 died. The season was quite wet, so that I lost 

 eleven and raised eighteen. I should have 

 raised more, probably, had I been situated so as 

 to have let them run sooner, but as it was I 

 succeeded much better than most of the farm- 

 ers in this section. I give the young ones no 

 food for the first twenty-four hours or longer, 

 leaving them to peck the stones and dirt. Aft- 

 er this I feed moderately with the curd of sour 

 milk, never with clear meal, until they are sev- 

 eral weeks old. 



" My turkeys, I am quite confident, not only 

 know my voice but my person ; and why not ? 

 'The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his 

 master's crib.' This season they have not ram- 

 bled to any distance, and usually taking care to 

 be at home at meal times. But if all this is 

 not sufficient to satisfy you of their being more 

 domesticated than the 'commonalty,' let me 



add another circumstance which somewhat sur- 

 prised me. The first of November I changed 

 my residence, moving about thirty or forty rods 

 from my former house, designing to remove the 

 turkeys as soon as I had prepared a place to 

 confine them. But the day after I removed, the 

 turkeys followed one of the members of my 

 family without his calling them at all, and came 

 to the barn of their present home, when I fed 

 them. At night they flew into an apple-tree in 

 the garden, and have given me not the least 

 trouble since. The tree where they formerly 

 roosted is within sight, and yet they have never 

 been into it, but have remained perfectly con- 

 tented with their new location. I have nine 

 of them now, all but one of which I design to 

 put on my farm in the spring. The males which 

 I killed the 16th of November, averaged about 

 10 pounds, and one of them weighed 10! pounds, 

 all young ones. 



" I think in an ordinary season I can ten-fold 

 a flock of turkeys at an expense not exceeding 

 twenty cents each." 



As a further proof that turkeys may be made 

 as tame and domestic as any other fowl, we will 

 relate what occurred on our own premises: 

 About two years ago we purchased a cock and 

 two hen turkeys of the white variety. They 

 had been hatched in the woods and suffered to 

 run at large, and in the fall they selected some 

 tall pines for their roosting-place. On bringing 

 them home and putting them in the yard with 

 the other fowls, they refused to stay there, and 

 would not roost in the house at first, preferring 

 the top of the building or a tall elm-tree stand- 

 ing near. As the cold weather approached, 

 and feeding them only in the house, they final- 

 ly took to roost with the other fowls, and have 

 remained there ever since. 



They soon became very quarrelsome, and 

 would not suffer the other fowls to sit near 

 them, pecking with their bills and throwing 

 them from their roost. For which reason we 

 attempted to keep them out of the yard, and 

 removed them to the barn-yard, where there 

 was a good shed for them to roost in. While 

 the snow was deep they remained tolerably 

 quiet, but as soon as the weather and snow 

 would permit, they found their way to the yard 



