Boys will be boys

I used to hate it when people contributed a boy's bad behavior to his gender, but after living on a farm for just a couple years, I realized where some of those old ideas came from. When it comes to animals, hormones trump everything, and boys will be boys. We already know that several of our turkeys are males, because one started strutting, and then a couple more started to imitate him. The only time females strut is if they are feeling threatened, so it's pretty unlikely that a female turkey would be strutting at this age. If you look at his back end, where he will someday have tail feathers, and you can see that he is even trying to make his tail stand up. I still hate it when people say, "boys will be boys" about humans, because I think we are a bit more sophisticated and intelligent than turkeys.

And Coco finally decided to let us see her lovely kids. She woke me up at 3:35 a.m. on April 30 and gave birth to two huge bucklings about 20 minutes after I arrived in the barn. They were trying to stand within about 10 minutes, and the first one had nursed before he was 30 minutes old. The boys are as big as kids that are a couple weeks old, and they're doing great!