Doug Fattic
03-26-2016, 03:15 AM
I live on several acres in the city of Niles that has a population of about 15,000. It is just north of the Indiana border and Notre Dame University. My bicycle frame shop is a couple hundred feet behind my house and behind that is a steep river bank. Before the river is quite a bit of marsh/swamp land and a multi-use trail that used to be a railway bed. This low lying land doesn’t have any access so it is a mostly undisturbed habitat for wildlife. Students that take my frame building class are often amazed at the deer and wild turkeys they can see in the yard looking out the shop window. We watched a pileated woodpecker go to work on a tree stump a couple of days ago. They are a good sized bird almost as big as a crow. One of my students saw a wildlife battle this week between a coyote and the turkeys and was able to document it with a couple of pictures.
These big birds appear occasionally and graze across the yard. This time of the year the hens peck at the ground while the toms trail behind with their feathers spread hoping to get lucky. Suddenly out of the wooded area on the bank appeared a coyote. Instead of the turkeys running/flying away (they don’t fly gracefully) they all turned to face the coyote and started to go towards him. My student was able to take a picture of this action. His shot only caught the left side of the drama but the turkeys were also coming at him from the right too in a semi-circle. In the picture you can see that the coyote is looking at my student taking the picture. He saw the odds weren’t in his favor and ran back down the hill. I was surprised that the aggressors were the turkeys rather than the other way around.
These big birds appear occasionally and graze across the yard. This time of the year the hens peck at the ground while the toms trail behind with their feathers spread hoping to get lucky. Suddenly out of the wooded area on the bank appeared a coyote. Instead of the turkeys running/flying away (they don’t fly gracefully) they all turned to face the coyote and started to go towards him. My student was able to take a picture of this action. His shot only caught the left side of the drama but the turkeys were also coming at him from the right too in a semi-circle. In the picture you can see that the coyote is looking at my student taking the picture. He saw the odds weren’t in his favor and ran back down the hill. I was surprised that the aggressors were the turkeys rather than the other way around.