As a child, I spent several weeks each summer and a few winter holidays along Kootenay Lake, in sa国际传媒’s Interior.
I remember bright red Kokanee salmon swimming up the aptly named Redfish Creek to spawn in late August.
I remember watching ospreys fish off of Longbeach. I remember a black bear that made a habit of overturning the coffin-sized freezer in the lean-to outside my grandmother’s kitchen door for a few weeks one summer and a cougar feeding on the carcass of a deer up the hill behind her house another year.
I recall roosters crowing, eagles singing and ravens chortling. During one sleep-deprived week-long visit, the nails-on-blackboard screeches of a peacock kept as a pet by one of my aunt’s neighbours woke me early every morning.
What I do not recall from my visits to the Kootenays in those years are black, wattle-necked turkeys strutting along the highway (or anywhere else) and roosting in the trees (or anywhere else).
Wild, wandering turkeys are something I would remember, even if my familiarity with the bird at the time was limited to Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners.
Life put a stop to my visits to the shores of Kootenay Lake for about two decades. During my absence, wild turkeys invaded.
“What’s with all the turkeys?” I asked my aunt on a visit a couple of years ago.
She rolled her eyes. “Be careful when you’re driving. They’re a hazard.”
“It would be one way to acquire Christmas dinner,” I said.
That fall, virulent bird flu was once again making its way through the farmed flocks of the Fraser Valley, and bagging a turkey from the grocery store — let alone being able to afford one at the checkout counter — had become a game of good fortune.
“And they would be as tough as old boots,” my aunt replied.
Attempts were made in the early 1900s to bring wild turkeys to sa国际传媒’s wildlands from their native eastern-U.S. homelands.
Populations introduced to Washington state in the 1960s were more successful. They thrived, then spread north of the border. Since 1990, the wild turkey has expanded its range throughout the valleys of the East and West Kootenay and the southeast Okanagan.
By the late-’80s, the birds’ numbers in the Kootenays had grown to the point that the sa国际传媒 government started allowing limited wild turkey hunting.
Today, licensed hunters in sa国际传媒 are allowed to bag up to three turkeys from the Kootenays — one in the spring and two in the fall.
But, as my aunt pointed out, wild turkey is an entirely different culinary experience than grocery-store turkey.
The wild birds’ lives are far more active than those of their domestic cousins. They run, they dodge cars, they chase each other and are chased by dogs, raccoons, coyotes and other predators.
They fly up to roost high in tall trees each evening and flap down again to gobble bugs, tasty weeds and small critters on the ground in the morning.
As they strut and prance, they pump their drumsticks and work their wing and chest muscles.
If any end up in the roasting pan, the result is often more-flavourful meat … that requires much more jaw exercise than we are used to at the dinner table. These are not the turkey tenders and cut-with-a-fork cordon-bleu cutlets Canadian poultry farmers ply us with.
Rendering tender these tough ol’ birds takes a different approach than for the butterball centrepiece of the holiday feast.
Luckily for us, culinary cultures from less-affluent regions of the world where households raise well-exercised, often wide-ranging poultry (usually chickens) in their gardens (and often streets) provide some solutions.
Recipes from those countries often include spices and other ingredients that help break down rubbery muscle protein, more stewing in sauces, lower cooking temperatures and longer cooking times.
Using typical North American farmed poultry in such recipes often results in the meat dissolving into strings that you could use to floss your teeth. Grocery-store birds just don’t need the degree of tenderizing these recipes are designed to provide.
But a wild-turkey feast experience is already off the main path for most Canadians.
If you’re making the effort to bag a wild bird, employing the wisdom of other cultures is not a huge step further across the map.
The best of the coming season to you, whatever your turkey or non-turkey preferences.
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