An arrow to the chest? This wild turkey is unruffled
For months, a wild turkey has been spotted roaming the rolling hills of Carmel, California, with a 30in arrow sticking through her chest. It hasn’t seemed to faze her.
Local residents first began spotting the bird, who they’re calling Cupid, last winter. Since then, she has been photographed and filmed roosting in trees, foraging for grubs and evading predators and generally going about her business as if she hadn’t been impaled.
“We were all shocked,” said Beth Brookhouser, a spokesperson for the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Monterey County. “We don’t know how the turkey evaded death with this one. She is incredibly lucky and very resilient.”
Guy Churchward, a tech CEO and wildlife photographer who lives in the area, first heard tales of the bird last Christmas, at a community holiday party. A neighbour’s son had spotted an unbelievable sight. “A turkey with an arrow – I thought was the oddest thing,” Churchward said. Months later, in May, he saw her for himself. “I immediately jumped out of my car to take a photo.”
He named her Cupid, and has been championing her case ever since, tracking her whereabouts with his 600mm lens to get a closer look at her wounds, and petitioning local wildlife agencies and the SPCA to come help. He’s offered to donate money or supplies to local agencies to help capture and treat her.
In recent weeks, neighbours have been exchanging information about her whereabouts on community message boards.
Brookhouser said the agency has been reviewing videos and photos from Churchward and other residents, and weighing whether treating the bird could cause more harm than good.
“She does not seem to be having at this point any sort of serious infection. She’s still moving around really well. She’s able to fly. She’s still accepted by her flock,” Brookhauser said, noting it was possible that the arrow has only pierced through her feathers and not bone. The organisation is asking locals to call them immediately if they spot her, so they can dispatch an expert to take a closer look.
Cupid lives across two sprawling planned communities in the hills just north of Big Sur. Because her range covers such an expansive area, including the 2,000-acre planned community Teháma, owned and developed by Clint Eastwood and the neighbouring Monterra, Brookhauser said she is difficult to track. “Picture yellow hills and oak trees everywhere,” she said. “It’s the perfect habitat for wild turkeys.”
Based on the length and color of her beard, Cupid appears to be a hen, at least a year old,said Rebecca Dmytryk director of Wildlife Emergency Services, a private volunteer group based in California’s central coast, though some locals have also wondered whether the turkey might be a juvenile male.
The SPCA has said it is also looking for more information about who might have shot the turkey. Hunting in the area is illegal, and locals suspect the arrow that pierced Cupid is a practice arrow rather than a hunting arrow meant to kill. “We felt terrible that somebody would be this cruel,” she said.
Cupid isn’t the first bird to have looked death in the eye, and kept on moving.
Earlier this summer, locals in Fort Collins, Colorado spotted another turkey with an arrow running down his back. In Homer, Alaska, volunteers helped rescue a sandhill crane, who had been shot with an arrow through his breast and out the wing, but was still walking around and feeding his colts.
But the most famous impaled avian is the Rostock pfeilstorch, a white stork who was skewered with an iron-tipped wooden spear in central Africa, and flew back to western Europe before ultimately being taken down by another arrow in Germany. In 1822, the bird helped Europeans solve the mystery of where birds went during the winter. (Before then, many experts still believed birds hibernated, metamorphosed or other more fantastical explanations.)
In Carmel, Churchward and other locals are still hoping that something more can be done to help Cupid. “She seems to have done pretty well by herself, but still,” he said. “You’ve got to assume that the arrow is about three times the width of the bird. What if that bird wants to go through a tight space? It’s going to hit that arrow and that could open up the wound.”
The son of an avid birder, Churchward said he had been obsessively documenting local wildlife, everything from hawks to hummingbirds. Wild turkeys may not be the most glamorous of local fauna, “but we can’t set a value on its life”, he said. “We’ve just been looking for a way to help, and we’re at a loss.”