Sex is not the topic of this entry. It is an hourly occurrence between the chickens, ducks, turkeys, and geese on my homestead this time of year. They mount shamelessly on land and water, rushing from courtship to consummation.  

Procreation is the newsworthy event. This is because so many generations of domesticated fowl  were bred, with determined exclusivity, for tender meat and reliable egg production. As a result, most have lost their nurturing instincts. Stacked in my refrigerator are dozens of fertilized eggs that were abandoned by their moms immediately after they were laid. They squawk or cluck and quickly rejoin the flock.  

That is why, when a gorgeous white turkey named Antonia settled down in the empty planter on the side of the garage and didn’t budge for three days, we began to anticipate a rare occurence - home-hatched baby turkeys! The impulse to perform the rites of turkey maternity may not have been lost after all. 

Antonia’s ill-chosen site subjected her, alternately, to rain and glaring sun. She endured the discomfort and rarely left her nest for even a drink. Only once was I able to beat her hasty return to the nest and catch a glimpse at her clutch – six speckled turkey eggs and one beige chicken egg!

It takes turkey eggs a week longer to mature than chicken eggs.  Antonia was about to confront a dilemma.  Was her body clock, timed to the transition from setting to tending, set for 21 days when the chicken hatched, or 28 when her own babies emerged? As we debated these alternatives, she invented her own solution. It was both discerning and brutal. On the 21st day I discovered a cracked beige chicken egg on the ground near the nest, a victim of Antonia’s powerful mothering impulse. Somehow she recognized the foreign, ill-timed intruder and managed to nudge it up and over the lip of the planter, banished and left to die.

Romanticized views of nurturing instincts were shattered on the 28th day as well. One by one the eggs vanished. I could hear faint baby “cheeps”, catch a glimpse of a cracked egg, then it would disappear without a trace. I watched the clutch diminish – five, three, only one.  Then I caught a glimpse of her flying higher and faster than ever before with a white object in her beak. I followed her trail and discovered a cracked shell. It contained the last baby, perfectly formed but still curled tight with its head tucked into its little belly and its feet drawn up, expelled, abandoned, dead.

The climax of this sorry tale came today. The murderous mother spent this entire day sitting on her empty nest. She appeared to be oblivious of her deeds and their consequences.

Antonia was hatched in an incubator, warmed by electric heat , and fed factory mash. Perhaps the mral of this sorry tale is that there are no surrogates for real mothers. They teach their babies how to grow up to be tender, tending adults.   

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