Flashes of Panic

I was coming up the hill towards the College on 116, passing my Favorite View in Amherst® when I spotted some large birds flying low over the road ahead of me.

“Hmm,” I thought, “I wonder why those geese are having so much trouble getting altitude from the golf course.”

Then I realized that I was watching a flock of turkeys—well over a dozen, maybe twenty—crossing the road. I’d seen groups of turkeys (generally fewer than this, of course) hanging out in the nearby woods and sometimes browsing the hayfields where the cross-country course goes, but never this many this close.

And I have to say, there’s nothing that flies quite like a turkey. They fly the way novices ride bicycles: tentatively, in short segments, sometimes crash-landing.

Now Playing: Fortunate Son by Bruce Hornsby

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