After reading about the hunters in the Passenger Pigeon, one cannot help but see how the vulture resembles its human counterpart. Vultures are least desirable birds and are compared in many ways to humans, given their excessive—even gluttonous—eating habits, and the way in which they prey unrelentingly on things. Also, Audubon finds that they are not, in fact, distinguished by a keen sense of smell. Instead, they are visual creatures like humans, and he says they also rely on memory. The turkey nests so as to hide eggs from the sight of the vulture, and the main determinants of where to nest for turkey hens are hunters and vultures/crows (200).
Audubon has a very diplomatic way of presenting his observations, developing the birds’ traits in a succession, using patterns of repetition, in order to move toward the classifications he makes, while still seeming to rest on scientific evidence. Yet, the birds are made into characters, with character flaws and predictably repetitive patterns of behavior, which all serve to bolster their personality types. The turkey is the least graceful of the birds we’ve read about. At first sight, it is also the least intuitive and thoughtful, and is, instead, very reactive, bewildered even by its own reactions, awkward, cacophonous, erratic. However, Audubon distinguishes gender differences within species with such detail, and this serves to complicate his caricatures.
Looking at the Passenger Pigeon image at the Lilly, we discussed briefly the curious relationship portrayed between male and female. The female is placed above the male, so it seems she is feeding—moreover, providing for him. It is also interesting how the female Turkey is characterized separately from the male. “The young cocks…gobble and strut, while the young hens pur and leap” (202). The males are given to “ceremony” and their behaviors reflect their baser desires and impulsiveness, whereas the females are portrayed as more intuitive and conscious of her surroundings—particularly with regard to her young. The female, guarding her nest, knows the difference between a human who is careless and unaware of her, and one who intends to approach and/or harm her, the same way she knows when to pursue or abandon the male turkey. Once Audubon “returns to the females” (200), which occurs after a much shorter time spent describing the males, the portrait of the turkey becomes more complex. There is a great deal of “instinct” and intuition among the female turkey and her young. While the female is clearly the smarter, more complex of the two, and switching back and forth between the sexes presents two very different species of Turkey, the female description seems to color all succeeding description of the turkey, giving a greater sense of purpose to the male behavior.
I don’t know why yet, but I am especially struck by this dichotomous way of understanding species of birds—that by understanding how each is broken down into gender roles, and how the male and female correspond to and supplement each other, a more holistic view is gained of the bird as it exists and acts in its natural environment….
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It's very good of you, Kelly, to write about the Turkey, an essay we skipped in class, because, as always, there was so much to do. I think your observations on gender in Audubon are spot on--by describing in such detail the domestic lives of the birds he complicates our picture of them ("holistic" is a good term for that, I think). A more detailed reading of these gender relationships could also take into account how these relationships are usually triangulated, with Audubon the observer and hunter inserting himself into the relationship--viz. the passages describing how Audubon passes by the nest of the female, trying to trick her into accepting his presence. Every time I reread this piece I'm struck, like you, by how testosterone-driven the males are, and how all the intelligence seems to reside in the brain of the female. Darwin picked up on this when he relied on Audubon in his book on sexual selection, The Descent of Man. (The exception to the rule is the male wild turkey kept by Audubon--but here the male turkey's behavior is also rather incautious). The parallels with human behavior are probably intended--and Audubon's presence in the text blurs the boundaries even more. At the same time, it's always clear that the female turkey--constantly threatened as she is--operates in a very different, harder environment than the village where Audubon lives and keeps wild birds as pets.
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