Typing only casually the other morning on some commentary of political despair, having surrendered the week prior, I noticed a rafter of wild turkeys assembled at my ground-level window. It gave me a start. It looked like these well-armored creatures could smash through the glass if they were so inclined.

Joe Soucheray

A murder of crows, a skulk of foxes, a colony of rabbits, a rafter of turkeys. I could add a passel of possums to our burgeoning urban wildlife, but I have seen only one and one was enough.

We have long discussed turkeys in St. Paul. They were brought here years ago by Johnny Appleseed or some such folklore and now Minnesota has 225,000 wild turkeys, according to something called 8BillionTrees.com. They have been around and it’s not unusual to see them all over the city. There are people who occasionally don’t get their mail, or get it late, because a turkey can hold a grudge against a postal carrier.

To see them at my window so close was alarming. They bobbed and weaved and pecked at the ground for spilled bird seed. One of them stared at me and then gulped and bobbed and weaved. They sport a bit of the menacing ruffian, dressed all in black, possibly carrying switchblades or a roll of quarters. If birds could smoke, these are the guys who would go out behind the school at noon.

We can walk among them if they are on the other of the street, and they keep their distance on a golf course; they are not skittish and may be growing into an awareness of their power to astonish. Perhaps soon they will be as comfortable around us as deer, which allow us sometimes to get as close as an arm’s length and appear to actually listen when you ask them what they are up to.

The turkeys, seven or eight of them, were certainly comfortable at my window and that was a first. Seeing me didn’t put them off. When I stood and put my nose to the glass, they didn’t pay any attention.

Now, as I mentioned, we have long discussed turkeys in St. Paul. I am entirely aware that they aren’t recent arrivals. But there are pressing questions, chief among them, is there but one rafter or several? Is this an inundation or not? I have seen what could have been this group all over town, as far away, for example, as the Como neighborhood. Are we seeing the same nomadic group? When I don’t see them in my neighborhood, I might see them in Crocus Hill or Mac-Groveland or along Mississippi River Boulevard, or on the East Side.

I left the house shortly after I saw them at my window that day. Well, I didn’t see them anywhere else that day.

Some days, nobody sees them. OK then, where are they? They sleep in trees, but they are not nocturnal and are out and about all day long. I am not buying the 225,000 number. If there were that many, you’d see more than one group at a time.

There are seven, eight at the most. It will certainly give us pause if they get as close as the window on Thursday.

Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com. Soucheray’s “Garage Logic’’ podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.

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