when the turkey comes home to roost

Salmon
Salmon salmon
In the River Tweed
You seem to swim
At such a speed
And really salmon
How I wish
You wouldn't end up
On a dish.

Spike Milligan, Condensed Animals, 1991.

Well I've spent the last three months fitting in six months of work - and I'm cooked! an hour a day with the husband and children, dogs that politely, but firmly, barr my entrance as I walk through the front gate, and a possum whom I've developed a nodding acquaintance with. These are not good signs.

But perhaps the most damaging of all is the epic failure of my shoo-turkey program. In the absence of my work from home days, and family weekends working in the garden, he has relocated.........on top of my fallow vegie garden.

When I decided that the bird wire enclosure around the garden, and the bird netting over the garden should come down until something a little more elegant was constructed, it never occurred to me that the scrubby might see this as an open invitation. But indeed, he has.

Every last scrap of inch thick newspaper laid over garden beds, covered in bagasse has relocated - into a nest over four metres in diameter. And even this isn't enough. Every day he trumpets at the chicken house, trying to find a way to remove their small portion in their home.

Yes, I should have seen this coming - after all he did claim ownership over a round bail (equivalent of 15 bales), trying to drag its contents over a 10 metre height differential.

And I was ready to break up his nest the other day, anything to stop the constant harassment of my chickens - and I stopped. There he was grinding a circle with his beak, splaying his wings in rhythmic display - and the girls were impressed! Two female turkeys were cautiously circling, ready for flight should he change his mind. And I was mesmerized. If I ran in now, I could stop the show - stop the function of the nest, end our misery now. No little turkeys scratching around on our roof, no rampant dogs playing make a wish with baby turkeys in the future - in that moment I could have changed the uncertainty of the future. But I just couldn't.

As pissed as I am with this bird, he's resisted the commando rolling and firing of the whole family with high pressure water guns, the intermittent chasing from the dogs - and not only hung around in our yard - but built a monument to his fortitude. I cannot but admire his persistence.

I have no idea what we will do when the babies turn up, and the dogs come looking for sport. We insist the children stay outside whenever we let the chickens out for a roam (and I've heard they are now starting to challenge the cocky bird). But then he has also redeemed himself by industry on a particular front.

There's a mad woman who lives across the road from us - I don't want to invest in labels, and god knows there are quite a few that apply to her - but she's just nuts - harmless - but nevertheless nuts. So when the scrub turkey decided to acquire her pile of mulch in her front yard and create a speed hump across the road between our two properties, who am I to enter into the discussion? it took her a few days to realise where the mulch had gone (which is a surprise, given that a trail stretched from his nest, up the hill, over the electric fence, through the chain mess fence, down a 2 metre high embankment, onto the grassy sidewalk and across the road). After intensive questioning of the children, she eventually accepted that "the scrubbie did it" defence, and proceeded to painstakingly scrape up her mulch that hadn't already made it to the nest - and put it back to where it came from - the pile in her front garden near the edge of the road.

And the following morning the scrubbie was out there again, painstakingly raking her mulch back across the road, up the hill through the electrified fence and down to the nest. I saw her out there with her bucket again this afternoon - but really - I don't rate her chances!