TALKING TURKEY.

Joe Hutto, who is sixty-one, has spent most of his waking life looking at wild turkeys. He may have looked at more of them than any other living American, with the "possible exception" of Lovett E. Williams, Jr., a wildlife biologist, and the bird's principal, and probably only, life-long authority. Hutto is a trained wildlife biologist, too. He is an archeologist as well. He has also managed a zoo in Panama City ("heavy on the reptiles") and a ranch in Wyoming (a thousand head of cattle), and been an elk-hunting guide, a competitive springboard diver, a dog handler (Labradors), a horse trainer, a landscape painter, an antiquities scuba diver, and a venomous-snake catcher (three dollars a foot for rattlers, a dollar for water moccasins). But mainly he has been a student of the wild, especially birds, and has come up with some surprisingly unconventional ways of conducting his studies.

Thirteen years ago, Hutto, who was living near the Panhandle coast of Florida, heard that a tractor-driver, clearing some land, kept finding wild-turkey eggs. All his life, Hutto had wanted to raise his own wild turkeys. The process--in which you convince newborn animals that you are their parent--is known as imprinting, named by Konrad Lorenz in 1935, after he had raised greylag geese from wild eggs. Many zoologists believe that it was through imprinting, or something like it, that societies took once wild animals, like the wolf, and domesticated them into household pets, like the dog. Hutto first applied the practice (without knowing it was a "practice") when he was ten years old, having come upon a baby squirrel, its eyes closed, and fed it with a nursing bottle. "You figure into the physiology of the brain of the animal--no longer a cute, furry thing in the woods but a creature with its own psychology and way of seeing the world." Since then, Hutto has raised hawks, coyotes, owls (three kinds), crows, rats ("One of earth's great generalists, like the cockroach, the coyote, and the human"--meaning that their diet and habitat are not locale-specific but can be virtually anything and that they are therefore capable of surviving almost anywhere), mice, rabbits, opossums, foxes ("no creature more intense, more deliberate, or more uncompromising"), bobcats, black bears ("I still haven't raised a grizzly," he lamented, although he was almost killed by grizzlies several times, having been unable to contain his curiosity whenever he came upon one and compulsively giving chase, oblivious that he was pursuing a female, say, and that the smaller versions running alongside were cubs), elk, a stump-tailed macaque, deer (four kinds), and monkeys. Recently, he raised wood ducks. He'd been walking through a park--Hutto has a home next to the St. Mark's National Wildlife Refuge, about thirty miles from Tallahassee--spotted a nest that had been exposed and crushed in a storm, and swooped the ducklings up in his arms. ("A highly illegal act--you don't steal animals from a game reserve, even if the mother isn't there. I just thought, I will never have this opportunity again.") At home, he put them in a wire cage and lay down on the ground next to it, perching his head on a corner. The ducklings had huddled, terrified, on the far side. He continued to stare, not moving. After thirty minutes, they started staring back. ("It was my eyes, they'd become aware of my eyes, and found in them whatever they needed.") Then, in a mysteriously spontaneous rush, they streaked across the cage and huddled up against his face: imprinting had started.

Hutto's wild-turkey flock began when he found sixteen eggs on his doorstep left by the tractor-driver. Hutto knew how difficult the eggs were to come by: hens, once impregnated, walk until they discover a site out of the way enough to make a nest and don't leave it unless aggressively chased off by a predator. Five days later, the driver left thirteen more eggs--all together, an astonishing bounty. For most of the next week, Hutto tended his stash, keeping it warm, talking to it (variations on "yelp, yelp," to begin the imprinting process), until the poults were hatched. ("Poults" are chicks; "jakes" are young males; "gobblers," adult males.) Then he raised them. Effectively, Hutto turned himself into a turkey. He walked like one. He went up into a tree like one. He learned to hunt for bugs like one. Without instruments or recordings, he learned also to talk ...