every day is turkey day

The view from my garden. Credit: Meera Subramanian

I have reluctantly returned to the country of my birth, the place that has always inspired the greatest culture shock after long travels. How quickly I’ve stopped dreaming in Spanish, as the raucous sounds of English fill my mind. Foot travel and cheap trains are replaced by big trucks riding the ass of my Prius as I drive too far to get a dozen eggs that cost six times what they did in Spain. But there are good friends, and my beloved bookshelf, and the yard is teeming with turkeys and other signs of springtime life. Together, it is the antidote to the unraveling.

Between the work of catching up—pitching stories about renewable energy in Spain, preparing for a talk (more below), handling personal crises minor and major—I watch wild turkeys loitering about Cape Cod. Or, I guess, we’re the loiterers. They bear our presence. I could watch them all day. And do.

Take the time to notice the wild things around us. Credit: Stephen Prothero

Tomorrow is Earth Day, something I find myself resisting—every day is earth day, damn it!—and it comes as years of scientific gains and movement towards climate goals are being bludgeoned, as human rights from clean air to due process are eroded. I gather with my fellow citizens on the rotary who hold signs mentioning kings and oligarchs tight lest they blow away in the fierce wind. My friend and I talk with Andrew, a supporter of 47, a proud participant of January 6th, his language and message perfectly honed in response to any question. “Anything you want to ask us?” I offer, but he shakes his head and responds with a sentence that drifts away in the wind, “No, I have trouble getting my thoughts together…” We’ve all learned how to talk in this age of pontification. Listening is another skill.

We say we are in crisis. The crisis of democracy—the gun—the crisis of climate—the fire, the water, the rain—the crises of our own little lives—debt and Twitter and rage, and most of all the ordinary losses of love and loved ones that feel too vast. But that word, crisis, supposes we can act. It supposes the outcome is yet to be determined. The binary yet to be toggled, a happy ending or a sad one, victory or defeat. As it we have not already entered the aftermath.

Will we save democracy or lose it? Will the earth boil, or will we all drive electric cars? Are the dead gone, or do they live in our hearts forever?

Such imaginations we have.

My imagination wanders, as I watch eight tom turkeys back home, spectacular tail feathers fanned in full display, wings hanging low as they shimmy, faces an explosion of blue and bright red, all glorious and grotesque. The dangling wattle known as a snood draping down over their beaks in the most impractical of ways.

Tom turkey in full display. Credit: Meera Subramanian

You may have heard the ole story, about Benjamin Franklin and his disappointment that the aggressive eagle had been chosen as our nation’s symbol. In 1784, he wrote in a letter to his daughter:

For my own part I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country. He is a bird of bad moral character. He does not get his living honestly. You may have seen him perched on some dead tree, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the labour of the fishing hawk; and when that diligent bird has at length taken a fish, and is bearing it to his nest for the support of his mate and young ones, the bald eagle pursues him, and takes it from him. . . . the turkey is in comparison a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America.

I agree, even though my love of raptors is deep and slightly irrational. But even the morally bankrupt eagle only takes what she needs. Acknowledges the limits of necessity even as he steals from the osprey. But the turkeys do earn my respect as they did Benjamin’s, as they make their own way through the world. Mostly peaceful.

There’s been some fighting, too.

One male jammed his beak down the other’s throat and held it there for so long in a suffocating stalemate that I was thinking there might be a roast turkey for dinner. But one relented, and the other chased the loser away. It always seems to be the boys. The hens just want to eat in peace, and carry on with their task. I thank them for ridding our yard of ticks more than their sparring, strutting cohorts. But all play their part.

How quickly I’ve become accustomed to them. When a fox ran through the yard, they scattered, one even taking a lumbering flight to the treetops where they roost at night, (enormous black silhouettes against the skeletons of still bare oak branches and a gloaming sky draining of color). The daytime yard was empty for hours and a keening loneliness set in that only abated when I once again detected movement out of the corner of my eye.

When I went down to work in the garden to gather my thoughts, they scattered again, only to drift back up and surround me as I turned over the winter cover crop, preparing for what is to come, for another season to unfold. The work of a garden is endless. So is the work of democracy. Or for a habitable climate. I will be the first to admit it is exhausting.

Yet.

The turkeys carry on. And so do I. And so do you. Find our ways to fight and also know that we need to make time to ensure our own sustenance as well. Step away from the socials. Pick up the binoculars. Watch the natural world doing the work of living. The toms, the hens, together. They are all spectacular. These magnificently large creatures, living in our midst. Doing the work of replenishment. Eating. Courting. Creating more.

It wasn’t always like this. Native to North America, Meleagris gallopavo was domesticated by the Aztecs, who introduced them to invading Spaniards, who took them to Europe and then brought them back, while other conquerers nearly annihilated the wild ones. In the early 1800s, only about 30,000 remained, down from many millions. Today, there’s an estimated seven million in North America, in part because of the work of hunters and governments. Disappearance is one possibility. So is abundance.

No wonder I want to turn my attention to them. Especially as I prepare to share stories of disappearance and hopes of resurrection from South Asia about some other very large birds….

Talking vultures

For those in the Cambridge, Massachusetts area or who have access to a computer, I invite you to join me for a talk I’m giving this Friday evening for the Brookline Bird Club, taking place at Harvard’s Geological Lecture Hall. It’s titled South Asian Vultures: Crisis & Conservation. Here’s all the info and here’s a description:

Not too long ago, millions of vultures flew over South Asia, so abundant that no one had bothered to count them. Until the 1990s, when populations of three Gyps vultures collapsed by more than 97 per cent in a decade. It was the fastest avian decline ever recorded. Conservationists scrambled to find the cause and start captive breeding programs. What happens when South Asia’s essential clean-up crew vanishes? Cape Cod-based journalist and National Geographic Explorer Meera Subramanian has spent nearly twenty years searching for the answer to that question and discovered a story of conservation in a time of mass extinctions, a chronicle of biologists strategizing and cautiously celebrating. Join her as she shares photos and stories from covering the crisis in both India and Nepal, where the birds’ absence has had ecological, cultural and even religious implications.

Journalists & writer friends, take note…

• The Council for the Advancement of Science Writing (CASW) is accepting entries for the fourth Sharon Begley Science Reporting Award, a career prize for a mid-career science journalist of “unflinching dedication, skill, moral clarity, and commitment to mentoring”. Prize includes a $20,000 grant. Deadline: April 30, 2025.
• Orion Environmental Writers’ Workshop (June 15-20, 2025, The Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York) Join a community of writers, improve your craft, and reimagine how you think about nature. Guided by award-winning instructors, the Orion Environmental Writers’ Workshop provides an intimate space to connect with writers, artists, and editors, spark creativity, and renew, illuminate, and deepen your relationship with place. This week-long workshop is cosponsored by the Omega Center for Sustainable Living. Deadline: May 1, 2025.
• FRONTIERS open call for application for early-career journalists Round three! This is the same fellowship I just finished up in Spain, but targeted for early-career journos. Deadline: May 6, 2025.
• Covering Climate Now announced an updated training program, aimed at helping newsrooms grow their audiences by telling the climate story better. The program is available exclusively to journalists working for CCNow partners. For a list of the specific trainings they’re offering, free of charge and starting this spring, check out the Climate Journalism Training Catalog.

I’m reading/watching…

• After the Deluge by Gary Greenberg in Harper’s, in which he explores some of the same possibilities I did in this piece I wrote for Orion a while ago, but from the close vantage of a small Connecticut town’s selectman responsible for trying to unite a divided populace in the aftermath of a tornado…and a flood. What climate change?
• This consideration of life and death on a Washington farm, from my friend Christopher Solomon, in Orion.
• I’ll keep reading Brendan Boyle’s Substack, La Comunidad, on life in Spain. On his post, What does Spain think of Donald Trump?, he captured what I experienced during my travels and conversations across the Iberian Peninsula.
• I finished Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s Shadow of the Wind, which descended into darkness that feels like it’s getting closer to today’s America. But I’m holding onto this line, as I turn to new writing projects that still elude me: “Julián had once told me that a story is a letter the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.”
• I love this visual portrayal of land use made by National Geographic Explorer Dan Raven-Ellison, who traveled the length of Great Britain and captured drone footage of suburbia and bogs, fields and forests, seaside and soccer field, with each second representing a percentage of land use.
• This morning’s post by Bill McKibben, on the death of Pope Francis, a religious leader who recognized that the real roots of the climate crisis reside in the power imbalance created by a “technocratic paradigm” and viewing the world through a reductionist lens.

Coda…

Years ago, I attended an event in Chennai, India, with Jane Goodall as part of her ceaseless work with Roots & Shoots. I went with my mom and dad, my mom’s hair long and grey and pulled back in a long ponytail that made her look like Jane. Last week, my musician friend Casey Neill saw Jane in Oregon, still ceaseless at 91 years old, and there she was as musician Dana Lyons sang this song for her. Dana’s new record is ‘Cracks in the Heartland,’ which Casey produced. Enjoy, friends.

Don’t stop, ever.