Turkeys With Horns

                                                                                    Photo by Nation Cole, Granite Bay, CA

This was pretty exciting.  I had discovered a mutation that might change the face of turkeys everywhere.  But, before I got carried away with this discovery I figured that I might want to check it out a little.  I checked on the Internet and learned more about turkeys than I ever wanted to know.  Nowhere could I find even a hint of a horn on the nose of turkey.

I had heard that one of the marshals, Bill, on the Diary Creek Golf Course was a big fan of the local turkeys and could get them to come to his golf cart by imitating their call and bribing them with a little dried bread.  I approached Bill and asked him about having seen a horn on the nose of a turkey.  His response was that he had never notices but offered to have me join him on his cart and we could check it out. 

                                                     A large tom strutting down Main Street in Morro Bay
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I wrote an entry on the wild turkeys found here in Morro Bay.  As a result of seeing them amost daily and having them comment on my golf stroke (gobble-gobble), I have become quite familiar with them, but -

Recently I had the opportunity to visit friends in a rural area in Granite Bay near Sacramento.  They have a whole tribe of turkeys coming right in to their yard.  I noticed that their turkeys differed from those I’ve seen on the Central Coast because the males had a horn on their nose.  A horn on the nose of birds during the breeding season is common with Pelicans, but I have found no precedent for a horn on a turkey.
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Within minutes of starting out, Bill was true to his reputation and the turkeys came to his cart at a dead run.  The turkeys showed no fear and paid no attention to me with my camera.  The first thing that I observed was a young tom, less than a year old, had a fuzzy bump on his nose that could form into a horn.  This was a little disappointing because it indicated that the “horn mutation” was not unique to the Granite Bay turkeys. 

As we collected more turkey, I noticed that the Morro Bay turkeys did indeed have the same feature that caused my excitement.  As some of the older birds overcame their dignity and came close for a free lunch, started to see that as the turkeys got older the horn got fleshier.  By the time the birds got to be a couple of years older the horn became quite soft and started to melt over to one side.  So, maybe their horn wasn’t a horn, but a protuberance.
The final blow to my “horn theory” was to go back to the oldest turkey picture that I had on hand – the guy that I saw on Main Street in Morro Bay.  He had a flesh piece sagging off his nose that must have been five inches long and it waddled as he walked.  The whole foundation for the turkey mutation was based on the wrong observations.
As Gilda Radner (1946-1989) became famous for saying “never mind.”