Children's Literature / A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes

by Charles Madison Curry; Erle Elsworth Clippinger

For a nest the wild hen, like the tame turkey of the pasture, scratches a slight depression in the ground, usually under a thick bush, sometimes in a hollow log, and there lays from twelve to twenty eggs, which are somewhat smaller and more elongated than the tame turkey's, but of the same color: dull cream, sprinkled with reddish dots.

I have often hunted for stolen turkey nests, and hunted in vain, because the cautious mother had covered her eggs when leaving them. This is one of the wild habits that has persisted. The wild hen, as the hatching approaches, will not trust even this precaution, however, but remains without food and drink upon the nest until the chicks can be led off. She can scarcely be driven from the nest, often allowing herself to be captured first.

Mother-love burns fierce in her. Such helpless things are her chicks! She hears them peeping in the shell and breaks it to help them out. She preens and dries them and keeps them close under her for days.

Not for a week after they are hatched does she allow them out in a rain. If, after that, they get a cold wetting, the wild mother, it is said, will feed the buds of the spice-bush to her brood, as our grandmothers used to administer mint tea to us.

The tame hen does seem to have lost something of this wild-mother skill, doubtless because for many generations she has been entirely freed of the larger part of the responsibility.

I never knew a tame mother turkey to doctor her infants for vermin. But the wild hen will. The woods are full of ticks and detestable vermin as deadly as cold rains. When her brood begins to lag and pine, the wild mother knows, and leading them to some old ant-hill, she gives them a sousing dust-bath. The vermin hate the odor of the ant-scented dust, and after a series of these baths disappear.

This is wise; and if this report be true, then the wild turkey is as wise and far-seeing a mother as the woods contain. One observer even tells of three hens that stole off together and fixed up a nest between themselves. Each put in her eggs—forty-two in all— and each took turns guarding, so that the nest was never left alone.

What special enemy caused this unique partnership the naturalist does not say. The three mothers built together, brooded together, and together guarded the nest. But how did those three mothers divide the babies?

I said I wanted you to visit a farm where there are turkeys. And you will have to if you would see the turkey at home. For, though I have traveled through the South, and been in the swamps and river "bottoms" there all along the Savannah, with wild turkeys around me, I have never seen a live one.

I was in a small steamboat on the Savannah River one night. We were tied up till morning along the river bank under the trees of the deep swamp. Twilight and the swamp silence had settled about us. The moon came up. A banjo had been twanging, but the breakdown was done, the shuffling feet quiet. The little cottonboat had become a part of the moonlit silence and the river swamp.