The long road to turkey soup

Dan and Jody Spark take turns writing each Monday about life on the farm.

COLUMN — It was decision time two weeks ago. Should the turkeys stay or should they go?

In fact, our hen and tom made the decision for us when they failed to produce more turkeys. It was time to go.

Of course, it’s not like they didn’t try to hook up, as the kids say these days. They just couldn’t reach the next level of parenthood. Maybe they didn’t want to be parents. Or maybe they were just incompatible. Strange, they seemed like a sure thing at the beginning.

We had five turkey chicks to start with last year and eventually reduced our flock to two — a tom and a hen. We traded hens with a neighbour (I really didn’t want to harbour an incestuous relationship) and we waited. Excitement grew as our hen began laying large speckled eggs. That was a good sign, we thought; we’re on our way.

The next domino to fall was consummation, which we witnessed first-hand. At least, we think we did. The hen would crouch down onto the grass while the tom puffed up his feathers and did some ridiculous dance around her (it seems men of all species are more than willing to make fools of themselves). He would eventually walk onto the hen’s back, sink his sharp claws into her spine (we later found bruises), and wiggled to and fro.

From that silly little act we guessed that they did the deed, but one never really knows if the fertilization process was set in motion.

Either way, we never got any more eggs and, even if we did, the hen never turned broody, which meant it was unlikely she would want to sit on the eggs for weeks until they hatched. Grand plans for producing heritage turkeys, which we estimated to be of great value when you considered the meat-to-feed ratio, fell through. Just chalk it up to another failure at Shalom Acres.

So, two weeks ago, it was off to the chopping block.

Now, I don’t actually use a chopping block, I use cones when I slaughter our poultry. For chickens, I hold them upside down, gently slide them into the metal cone and coax out their heads from the bottom. And then I slice their neck and wait for them to bleed out and go to sleep.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a big enough cone for turkeys, so the killing process is slightly different and perhaps unorthodox. Either way, it does the job.

Because the tom is so big and aggressive, it takes a bit of strength. After wrapping my arms around him and holding as tight as I can to avoid getting pecked or slapped on the head by his wing — a very effective weapon in his arsenal — I take him to my slaughtering area and pin him to the ground. This is done as gently as possible, of course. Then comes the hard part — I have to find his neck. This may seem like a simple thing to do, but toms have such large, red bulbous formations on their neck that it’s hard to find a spot to get my knife in there.

Eventually, I do what I have to do and the tom bleeds out. The normal process after that is to dunk it into a pot of hot — not boiling — water to loosen the feathers. Again, because the tom is so darn big, I don’t have a pot large enough to put it in. So, as ridiculous as this sounds, I pour a pot of water on top of him while he’s laying dead on the ground. Amazingly, this actually works, and I set to work plucking it.

Again, with chickens, this process goes fairly quickly, but it takes me around 30 minutes to get the turkeys’ feathers out. I’m embarrassed to admit that some feathers are so tough for me to pull out with my hands that I have to use pliers to do the job.

The process of gutting it is actually quite simple and goes quite fast. This last time I even had company from my four-year-old daughter, who asked me to identify everything I pulled out of the bird’s carcass: “What’s that big red thing, Daddy?” That’s a heart. “What’s that pink stuff?” Those are its lungs. “Do I have lungs like the turkey?” Yes. “Is that where it died?” she says as she points to a puddle of blood on the grass. Yes.

It’s a long day and I have no doubt I have broken many rules, but there is one rule I am sure to follow on days like these: for supper, we’re having pizza.

Dan and Jody Spark are in their fourth year of living their back-to-the-land dream on their small acreage at McLure and they are having the time of their life.