At first, I was bitter.

This year we are being visited by a solitary wild turkey. I don't know if this is half the duo we had last year, or just a rogue turkey. It appears mid-morning and I always know when it's arrived. My cats all rally at the kitchen window, call out feline deprecations, and send "I could totally kill and eat you" waves out towards it.

This bird is roughly twice the size of my cats. Last year a wild turkey did enough damage to Binky's nether portions as it chased the cat away from its turklings that said cat got an abscess.

And yet, deep, deep in their hearts my cats believe that given a chance they could take that massive bird down.

Cats have rich inner lives.

Meanwhile, just down the road, one of our neighbours is feeding a flock of at least two dozen wild turkeys. TWO DOZEN! I have had to stop the Marnmobile and wait while his massive flock meanders across the road near his house back towards the woods. As I watch his flock disappear, my single lone wild turkey seems, well, squinky in comparison.

Okay, I'll admit it. I had a raging case of turkey envy. If someone had sent me a spam with the header, "Surprise Her With Your Massive Wild Turkeys" I would have opened that puppy in a heartbeat.

Today I found the silver lining in my cloud.

We've been in the middle of record breaking warm temperatures, making the mountains of snow around my house disappear. I happened to go out to where we're feeding the wild turkey cracked corn and to my horror I saw, uh, a veritable turkey turdistan.

Honestly, I'd never thought about the problem of bird waste because every other bird that flits through out lives, is, well, small. Their waste is negligible. But a wild turkey is twice the size of a cat, so you do a little of the "what goes in has gotta come out" math and you quickly realize that, well, you could well end up with a lumpy brown relief map of the Andes Mountains in the middle of your yard if you got enough wild turkeys.

Strangely enough, it wasn't an issue with last year's turkeys, but then we didn't feed last year's turkeys mountains of cracked corn, just wild bird seed. If we had a couple dozen birds producing at the scale of this year's bird, well, the spousal unit and I might have to think about buying carbon credits.

For the last few weeks I have noticed my neighbour's flock passing through the woods above our house on the way to his. I considering pulling a Hansel and Gretel, sprinkling a path of cracked corn leading from their normal route to our feeding station.

Yes, I was seriously considering a turkey hijacking.

Turkey envy is an ugly thing.

Fortunately, my Olympic level laziness kept me from strapping on snowshoes and trying to turkeynap his flock.

As we all know, though, the universe is a dark place. I won't be at all surprised that now that I've become aware of the brownside downside of large turkey flocks, my neighbour's flock will take it into their teensy birdbrains to adopt our feeding station.

It's just a matter of time.

Marn