Feb 26, 2024 4 min read

Just in time for the 2024 presidential election, we have learned of another dire threat to the American way of life that our vaunted Founding Fathers never foresaw.

That’s right: Marauding flocks of wild turkeys.

I know what you’re thinking: fake news! And I don’t blame you. I admit that I sometimes use hyperbole in my columns — heck, I always do, and that’s not overstating the fact. But this time, I can offer supporting evidence in the form of a story broadcast by WPXI-TV last week. Here’s the lead paragraph of the story from the WPXI website: “People living in a Pittsburgh neighborhood contacted Channel 11 for help, stating that wild turkeys are running amok and causing major concerns.”

“Running amok?” That term conjures up an image of thousands of turkeys, some wearing handkerchiefs over their faces, climbing walls, pushing barricades into overwhelmed police and otherwise behaving like a bunch of tourists at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. So I was quite surprised that doorbell camera footage given to WPXI shows only three turkeys running after a resident of Pittsburgh’s Brighton Heights neighborhood as he climbed the stairs to his front porch.

The man — I’ve not used his name in case the turkeys are reading this — escaped unscathed but was frightened enough to call WPXI after he and his wife — who said they are senior citizens — sought but received no relief from police or the Pennsylvania Game Commission.

“They [the turkeys] come out from around cars like gangsters, and there’s three or four of them, and you don’t know what to think, you don’t want to do no harm to them, but you don’t want to get harmed,” the man told WPXI.

People tell me that I’m a senior citizen, so I guess I should empathize with this elderly couple. But I just can’t. I’ve been confronted by large groups of wild turkeys while on rural bike trails yet have never felt that I was in danger. True, I stopped to let them cross the trail, but that was because they appeared to be out for a pleasant family stroll rather than looking to start a rumble. Plus, I didn’t want to take the chance that the turkeys would call a local TV station and report that some moron on a recumbent trike was running amok in their neighborhood.

Perhaps I’ve just been lucky. I’ve never been chased by a wild animal or even a domesticated one. True, I did call an animal enforcement officer after we discovered a raccoon peering out of the living room window of a neighbor’s house. But even in that case, it was to protect the raccoon from the neighbor.

In researching this story, I discovered that this is not the first time wild turkeys have made the TV news. In 2022, wild turkeys were said to be “terrorizing” a neighborhood in a Boston suburb. In 2023, KDKA- TV ran a story called “Flock of turkeys terrorizing North Side neighborhood. “It’s like the North Side gang, it’s like the North Side turkey gang,” a resident told a reporter.

I mean no disrespect, but I just can’t imagine running afoul of a fowl. It seems to me that even a large flock of agitated turkeys might be dispersed easily by confronting them in a threatening manner. Indeed, game commission representatives suggest that you can frighten away turkeys by squirting them with a hose, running toward them holding an open umbrella in front of you or by simply running at them while shouting something like, “You jive turkeys better get off my lawn!” Sound advice, I think.

But should these methods fail, I suggest you threaten them with a jar of gravy.