It’s Thanksgiving, so I have to do something on turkeys.
And turkeys, like a lot of gallinaceous birds, have these unique courtship motor patterns.
They do display them at relatively early age.
The adult version is far more dramatic:
Sometimes hen turkeys will go into this same motor pattern and gobble:
Now, turkeys can be made to gobble at virtually any weird sound, and it is also easy to get them to puff up and display.
However, the actual strutting behavior is a courtship motor pattern.
Of course, it is nothing like the courship motor patterns of the sage grouse, which is far more bizarre. The following was filmed using a “Fembot” sage grouse hen:
Over the generations, certain hens in various chicken-like birds have selected for unusual motor patterns in their mates. If a male can develop such weird behavior and have such extravagant display plumage, he must be a healthy bird with good genes to pass onto the next generation. Of course, she’s not reasoning that way, but her brain is wired to find these features attractive or at least somewhat novel. Eventually, the “aesethic sense” becomes as deeply ingrained in her DNA as the display motor pattern is in the male.
Strutting can be a courtship behavior, but it is also a dominance display, territorial display, greeting display, sign of excitement — pretty much anything a turkey gets really het up about. We call it “Who da man?” here.
My mother has made pets of our heritage turkeys. They will lie in her lap and sleep. When one vacates her lap, he or she always struts and lords it over the others.
I enjoy watching them. And there is nothing more bizarre to see than a turkey’s mobile snood.
I’ve seen them do this when they hear thunder, a barred owl hooting, or a pheasant crowing. That hen displaying is doing it for this reason (not, as one comment on that video suggests, because of her sexual orientation.)
I am much more accustomed to the Wile E. Coyotes of the turkey world.
When I hear the world turkey, I think something very wild that can fly and used to roost in my front yard.