WILD TURKEYS IN NEWTON - BOSTON

    And here we show the last post about our American trip. We could think that being in New York and Boston, big cities as they are, wouldn't offer too many chances to get involved in the nature of the country. And if we add to this the fact that the G.P. was almost the whole day in a educational workshop, the chances were almost zero. Fortunately the house of our host, Mr. Robert Swartz, was very close to a small forest, now covered of snow. Not too much to see, except the awesome landscape of naked maples and oaks in white. Suddenly, coming back to Swartz's house, I saw a couple of huge turkeys coming up to the middle of the road. A car driving fast had to brake immediately and wait patiently for the turkey to go away (American people in the East Coast, by the way, never honk the horn: they find it really annoying and rude). The driver put down the window and wonder how many were there. "At least, three or four. Is there any kind of farm right here?", I gave as an answer.  A farm, he smiled, you are joking, they are wild!" 

    Then I remembered that turkeys were originally coming from America, and that this huge turkey was the real wild turkey. I suppose that my reaction was similar to one person who sees for his first time in life a stork. And I reminded myself the days in Holland where dozens of people were watching a single stork nest as something really amazing (and I was smiling). Anyway, that was the comment of some people coming back to the house (American, generally speaking, are quite friendly, much more than some English I met in my life). People asked me where I was coming from, with such a smile in my face and a camera. When I gave my answer, they started to laugh at me (in a nice way) just because I took lots of photos of the wild turkeys. "So you come to Boston just to take some pictures of wild turkeys". "You have to understand me, this is completely unthinkable in my country". Ye op, they said. You are in America, what did you expect? 

   The current population of wild turkeys in America (according to wikipedia) is estimated around 4 million. Taking into account that in the eighteenth century it  was near 40 million, we could say that the decline has been severe but wild turkeys have the future solved; the number of turkeys in farms are some millions more than only four.

    The street where we stayed most of our time in Boston, and the people who were wondering why I was taking pictures of wild turkeys.