Point Reyes Light - March 3, 2005
Wild turkey sparks Tomales blackout
By Peter Jamison
A surprisingly resilient wild turkey downed power lines in Tomales last week, causing a four-hour blackout. The turkey, by all indications, is still alive and at large.
Tomales residents Margaret Graham and Walter Earle were drinking tea and reading the paper shortly before 6:45 a.m. last Friday in their home when they were startled by a loud explosion and brilliant flash of light from outside their window.
Running outside, they discovered three downed power lines and a dazed-looking turkey walking in circles on Hwy 1.
The couple watched as the turkey ambled into the field across the road from their house, disappearing into the brush.
"He could have had a heart attack later on in that field," Graham said. "But I don’t know. There were some feathers in the road, but they didn’t look burnt."
Earle immediately reported the downed powerlines to the Tomales firehouse.
"Some turkeys just took out the power lines," he recalled saying. Fire Captain Tom Nunes of Tomales told The Light that he assumed at the time that Earle was referring to drunk drivers, rather than birds.
Turkey appeared unscathed, 825 lose power
Arriving on the scene, Nunes and a crew of volunteer firefighters were baffled to find a mysterious scattering of feathers, but no turkey. After a search of the area yielded no dead or dying birds, Nunes could only confirm that the turkey had somehow survived a head-on collision with a 12,000-volt power line.
"You’d think where the power line broke there’d be a fried bird or something," Nunes said. "But we couldn’t find remnants or anything."
The jolt of electricity administered to other birds – such as turkey vultures – that more commonly touch live power lines is so strong that the birds typically burst into flames, Nunes said. In one such accident, in the summer of 1998, a flaming buzzard actually ignited a 2.5-acre grass fire along Old Rancheria Road in Nicasio.
Eight hundred and twenty-five households and businesses initially lost power when the blackout began at 6:45 a.m. Six hundred and twenty-two had their power back on by 8 a.m. Everyone had their lights back on by 10:15 a.m., spokesman Lloyd Coker of PG&E said.
Coker noted that he’d never heard of a bird surviving a brush with power lines, and he could recall only one instance when a wild turkey had flown into a power line, about eight years ago in Sebastopol.
"I certainly wouldn’t say it’s a common occurrence," he added.
The scarcity of such incidents is no surprise, since wild turkeys can only fly over distances of several feet, when they fly at all.
"They don’t fly all that well, so we’ve had no cases of turkeys hitting the power lines," Nunes said.
At the site of last week’s mishap, however, a steep hillside serves as a launching pad for the birds, which can float, frantically flapping their wings, to the field across the road.
Graham said she and her husband had often witnessed the birds in their short bursts of flight across the highway.
"They start up on the hillside and kind of fly across," she said. "If they do it right, they can just make it to the field, which is lower."
While Graham said of the turkey’s hit-and-run on Tomales’ electrical grid that she had "never seen anything like it before," it was not the first time she and her husband had suffered the depredations of the strangely aggressive birds. Once, she recalled, a wild turkey charged into her parked car for no apparent reason, smashing the car’s taillight and dying instantly.
One of the volunteer firefighters called to the scene had his own tale of the turkeys’ bizarre knack for cheating death. Years ago, the volunteer told Fire Chief Nunes, who relayed the story to the Light, he was driving on Sir Francis Drake Blvd. when a wild turkey flew in front of him. Unable to swerve, he struck the bird at about 50 mph. The force of the blow cracked his windshield. When he pulled over, however, the turkey was nowhere to be found.
"It spooked the hell out of him," Nunes said. "There was no dead turkey."
Wild turkeys introduced by Fish & Game
Such incidents form a small part of the long, unruly history of wild turkeys in West Marin. Because of their appeal to hunters, the birds, which are not native to California, were released by the State Department of Fish and Game in Napa County in the 1950s. Since then, they have spread throughout Marin and Sonoma counties. A small flock of turkeys was also released on the Loma Alta Ranch overlooking the San Geronimo Valley by wildlife biologists from Fish and Game in 1988; that flock quickly grew, and many of the birds migrated to the San Geronimo Valley.
The turkeys began to wear out their welcome when a flock took up residence in a stand of eucalyptus trees west of Tomales in 2000 (the birds are still there, and the trees where they roost are not far from the place where the power lines fell).
The birds became more and more brazen in their interactions with townsfolk, scratching up gardens, climbing over parked cars, and clucking aggressively at children in the street. Tensions came to a head in Jan. 2001, when two male turkeys (called "toms" or "gobblers") lunged at a pair of schoolchildren on their scooters in an apparent attack. The children escaped unharmed, but were forced to leave their vehicles behind to be gloated over by the strutting toms.
Wild turkeys have also caused problems at the Point Reyes National Seashore, where they have settled in the vicinity of Bear and Olema valleys. Given the chance, the omnivorous birds will feed on salamanders, endangered red-legged frogs, California quail eggs, and the acorns that other, native species depend upon, interim Supt. John Dell’Osso told The Light.
Tomales residents’ efforts to get rid of the turkeys have met with little success. The Marin County Humane Society deals only with domestic animals, and Fish and Game refuses to relocate the turkeys until an Environmental Impact Report is completed. In their desperation, residents even sought out exterminators, but could find none willing to take on an assignment involving turkeys.
It remains unclear what person or agency will eventually be charged with taking care of Tomales’ turkey problem. But whoever it is may find it difficult to rub out a creature that can walk away from a brush with a high-voltage electrical wire, leaving nothing behind but a beguiling pile of feathers.