Wild turkey flock in autumn clearing
— — a small thunder moving through the gold leaves.
Not only on a wall.
“A flock of eastern wild turkeys feeding across an October pasture edge, the gobblers iridescent in low sun. The bird was hunted out of Vermont by the 1840s. In 1969 the state released 31 birds from New York into the southern Green Mountains; today the population runs near 50,000, a quiet conservation success that most Vermonters now meet on their morning commute. From the studio.
Wild turkey flock in autumn clearing, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The eastern wild turkey (Meleagris gallopavo silvestris) was extirpated from Vermont by about 1840, lost to clearing for sheep pasture and to unregulated hunting. In 1969 and 1970 the Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department released 31 birds, trapped in New York's Allegheny region, onto state lands in Pawlet and Hubbardton in the southwestern hills. The reintroduction took. By 2000 turkeys had repopulated every Vermont county; the current statewide estimate runs near 50,000 birds. The species now supports both a spring gobbler season and a fall either-sex season under state regulation.
Autumn flocks travel in family groups — a hen and her summer brood, often combining with other broods to form winter assemblies of twenty or thirty birds. They feed across pasture edges and oak ridges through October and into November, taking acorns, beechnut, waste corn, and grasshoppers in the last warm afternoons. By December they roost together in tall white pines, often the same grove year after year, dropping to feed only on the warmer days. Fall hunting season opens in late October and runs about three weeks across the state.
Most of the year the flock is nearly silent. The famous gobble belongs to spring — to a tom courting hens through April and May — and is rare in autumn. What you hear in October is a soft kee-kee-run from a young bird that has lost the flock, the low cluck of a hen keeping order, and the slow drum of forty feet across dry leaves. Vermont's spring gobbler season opens the first Saturday in May; the fall season runs in late October and early November across the entire state.