Does the I-70 turkey want to cross the road?

Maybe you have seen the freeway turkey. You might have seen the turkey if your morning commute takes you west on Interstate 70, coming from Pickerington or Pataskala or other points east. If you drive this route, you approach the Livingston Avenue curve each morning with a certain amount of dread, expecting traffic to shudder to a halt or, on the worst winter days, bounce around like carnival bumper cars.

But lately you’ve been startled to see a turkey.

Sometimes the turkey is still. Sometimes it is walking. Sometimes it is right there on the shoulder of the freeway. Sometimes it loiters on the exit to Bexley like an offramp panhandler.

The first time you see the turkey it is standing on the shoulder of westbound I-70, staring stoically at the hundreds of vehicles that whiz by just a few feet from its beak.

There is little time to take in the turkey, because you are driving one of the vehicles whizzing by.

You think you see a beard, that tassel that dangles from the chest of a male turkey. But when you see the turkey again, you don’t see a beard. You accept that the turkey is androgynous.

You wonder: What on earth is this turkey thinking? Doesn’t this turkey recognize the danger? Doesn’t this turkey know it could be killed?

You also wonder: Is it even the same turkey? It has to be the same turkey, doesn’t it? Could there be two risk-taking turkeys strutting around

this close to Downtown?

It is impossible to tell the turkey’s intentions, because you are going too fast, and because it is a turkey. Even if the turkey wanted to tell you something, it communicates only with “a variety of sounds, including a male’s gobble, the hen’s yelp, a poult’s peep, an alarm call that sounds like putt and an assortment of purrs, trills, croaks, whines and barks.” You find this delightful information on the Ohio Division of Wildlife website.

Maybe, you think, the turkey speaks rudimentary chicken. Maybe, tiring of the city’s urban chickens clucking on and on about how great things are on the other side of the road, the turkey intends to see for itself. Maybe the turkey is

thinking, “I, too, like to live dangerously.”

Maybe the turkey is interested in our cars. If a turkey could drive, what would it drive?

A convertible. Definitely a convertible. Maybe yellow.

When you see the turkey again, it is walking east on the westbound shoulder, facing the oncoming traffic, as is proper.

Smart turkey.

This time the turkey looks tired. Its featherless head hangs low. It looks as though its convertible ran out of gas and it has been forced to hoof it — hoof it? — to the nearest service station.

You call Stormy Gibson, the director of education at the Ohio Wildlife Center. The center rehabilitates injured wildlife and educates

the public. Its permanent residents include a tom turkey, and you remember that a wild hen would come out of the woods to visit him in his enclosure.

Gibson isn’t troubled by the freeway turkey’s behavior.

“There may not be anything wrong with this turkey,” Gibson says. It might be a hen that was raised in the nearby patch of woods. Or it could be a young tom, known as a jake, that has been “kicked out of his family unit.”

“It could be he’s just using that as a bachelor pad, until he can find his own area and his own hens,” Gibson says.

The turkey is probably picking up gravel from the shoulder to help with digestion, she says. “The road, unless he’s trying to cross, doesn’t offer him anything. He’s staying on the edge.

“Turkeys are extremely intelligent animals,” Gibson says. “He or she knows what they’re doing.

“If that’s where they’ve chosen to live, then we kind of have to respect that,” she says.

When you see the turkey Friday, it is beneath the Exit 103B sign. You snap a picture, but it is blurry. You circle back to try again, but the turkey is gone.

You find yourself talking to it.

Keep your wits about you, turkey. Watch out for those cars. They’re dangerous.

Yes, even the convertibles.