Last winter, a mail carrier was making deliveries in the Arden-Arcade neighborhood of Sacramento when he was attacked by a “particularly aggressive” and “massive” male turkey.
The carrier, who was armed with some kind of stick, hit the turkey, killing it, California Department of Fish and Wildlife officials said.
There was reason to suspect that someone was feeding the neighborhood’s wild turkeys, which began attacking drivers and disrupting deliveries from the U.S. Postal Service, FedEx, Amazon, UPS and other carriers.
“I’ve been around about 25 years, so I kind of know turkeys,” Capt. Patrick Foy, a spokesman for the department’s Law Enforcement Division, said in an interview with The Times. “And I just looked at it, and I’m like, ‘Oh, this is the biggest turkey I’ve ever seen.’”
The incident in late February was the culmination of a conflict that had been bubbling for months between the turkeys and delivery drivers. Internal documents and videos obtained by the Sacramento Bee show that wildlife officials attempted to intervene for months prior to the incident but were unsuccessful.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service was called to capture the wild birds. An agent “searched for the birds on at least 2 occasions in early January but could not locate the offenders,” the Fish and Wildlife Department said in internal documents.
Since the incident with the mail carrier, wildlife officials have determined that a neighbor had been providing the turkeys with “copious quantities” of food, Foy told The Times.
“It probably contributed to the massive size of the turkey in question, because it was eating just an unlimited amount of food every day from this particular household,” Foy said shortly after the incident. “We are addressing that issue as a major contributing factor to this overall problem.”
The resident was told to “cease feeding these birds,” the Bee reported. It was unclear if the person would face fines.
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife reportedly began receiving calls about turkey attacks on mail carriers in October 2021. Officials advised against feeding the birds and suggested using tools such as an open umbrella to chase them away, the Bee reported.
“By mid-October, it was evident that the birds were not responding to normal ‘shooing away’ and one of the mail carriers was injured on his hand,” the agency said in a report obtained by the Bee.
The agency sent members of its Human-Wildlife Conflict team to the neighborhood to investigate.
Investigators, seen in videos shot by Foy, could walk right up to the turkeys, causing them to move away, but the birds were seen chasing a mail truck down the street, the Bee reported. One video obtained by the Bee shows two turkeys pecking and gobbling at a USPS truck while ignoring law enforcement and passersby.
The Human-Wildlife Contact team then got permission to conduct an operation: kill up to four of the birds. But the wily birds escaped wildlife personnel.
Two “capture operations in late October and early December were unsuccessful as the birds ran away from staff,” the report said.
So far, no turkeys have been captured or killed.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
The Prince of Wales has paid tribute to a “close friend” who was killed, alongside his son, in a plane crash in Kenya.
Scientists Down Under went to new depths to see a world never-before explored with human eyes.
The inland taipan is the most venomous snake in the world. Its venom contains an enzyme that makes it spread faster throughout the body when bitten.
Freezers that were searched were also found to be filled with various animal meats, including both deer and bear — the bulk of which was believed to be obtained illegally.
A snake-wrangling couple got a big surprise the other day in Southwest Florida.
Her husband “saw a shark swim by repeatedly.”
A mountain lion has been euthanized after it barged into a home in Sonoma County, California, and dragged out a woman's pet border collie by its neck last month.
Northern California has some of the strongest offshore winds in the U.S., with immense potential to produce clean energy. But it also has a problem. Its continental shelf drops off quickly, making building traditional wind turbines directly on the seafloor costly if not impossible. Once water gets more than about 200 feet deep – roughly the height of an 18-story building – these “monopile” structures are pretty much out of the question. A solution has emerged that’s being tested in several locat
A ruptured pipe dumped enough oil this week into a northeastern Kansas creek to nearly fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool, becoming the largest onshore crude pipeline spill in nine years and surpassing all the previous ones on the same pipeline system combined, according to federal data. The Keystone pipeline spill in a creek running through rural pastureland in Washington County, Kansas, about 150 miles (240 kilometers) northwest of Kansas City, also was the biggest in the system's history, according to U.S. Department of Transportation data. The operator, Canada-based TC Energy, said the pipeline that runs from Canada to Oklahoma lost about 14,000 barrels, or 588,000 gallons.
When the snow starts to fall this winter, this dog dad has the perfect potty hack.
A massive snake — believed to be a Burmese python — has been spotted slithering through Doral this week.
Police arrested an ex-con killer this week just over a mile from the house where four University of Idaho college students were killed in their sleep last month.
The 100-megawatt utility-scale solar project just announced by Erthos is not even close to the largest solar project currently being developed in the U.S., but it will be the only large solar farm with panels installed directly on the ground, without elevated steel racking or trackers. Erthos signed an agreement…
Commentary by columnist Dan Walters.
A woman went missing off the coast of Hawaii after she was apparently attacked by a shark while snorkeling with her husband, authorities said.
The leak occurred in Washington county, Kansas, with the affected segment being ‘isolated’ and the drip contained
Fish kills and breathing irritation continue for a large swath of the Southwest Florida coast.
A man-made environmental crisis is part of the anger building against Iran's government.
Los Angeles’ resident big cat will have his health assessed after recent attacks on two chihuahuas and roaming too close to homes
A FedEx driver panicked after striking a 7-year-old girl in Texas with his work van and threw her in the truck, where he killed her, authorities said.
