1877.] The Wild Turkey and its Domestication. 325 
there rear their young. After these get as large as quails, or 
perhaps larger, they generally bring them home, or with a little 
care they may be driven home. Although the young birds are as 
wild.as possible at first, after they have tasted corn a few times 
and find it is furnished by a man on foot or from a buggy, they 
lose all fear and become importunate, while the mother hen may 
still hang back suspiciously. I have often, when driving through 
the park, had the half-grown birds fly into the covered rock- 
away for corn, for they soon learned there was always corn there 
for them. 
The cocks after a few generations never get as wild as the hens 
do at the breeding season, but stay contentedly in the South Park, 
and nearly always keep together. They may amount to fifteen 
or twenty in number. If the nest of a hen is broken up she im- 
mediately seeks the cocks and then returns to seclusion, and gen- — 
erally she will even make a third nest if the second is destroyed. 
I have never seen the cocks fight for the hens, although there 
may be a dozen of them of equal age and size. These seem to 
have no leader and to have no master, and rarely have disputes 
except when being fed. Then one is very apt to make a pass 
at another, which is most likely returned, when two or three 
others will join in the fray, appearing quite indifferent as to 
which they hit. After a fracas of two or three minutes they all 
seem to remember that it is supper time, but on looking about 
they discover that the hens and the youngsters have taken it all. 
Whenever the new broods are brought home in the fall, they 
must be attacked by the home flock, — the old cocks, the barren 
hens, and the young ones, which have been initiated through sim- 
ilar tribulations. The mother hen is treated as a stranger just as 
much as if she had never been there before. A single day, how- 
ever, is sufficient to establish friendly relations, when the new- 
comers are admitted to the family circle on cordial terms. 
_Thave never noticed any disposition of the old cocks to inter- 
fere with a setting hen, or her nest, or her young brood, only 
when a half-grown flock comes home they are simply treated as 
Strangers, as already stated. 
The pinion of a wing has been removed from many of the old 
hens, and if the latter are kept in the South Park where the cocks 
run, and which is really the home of all, they nest there, fre- 
quently making the nest by a slight excavation in the open grass- 
plot, away from any protecting object, and one is astonished at 
the difficulty of finding the hen setting there, although the place 
