City life

The Year of the Turkey

A story about fear, aggression, threats, shaming, a public-space shutdown, a Change.org petition, and a three-foot-tall turkey named Gerald

This is a story that began in Oakland, in a neighborhood adjacent to mine, and spread around the Bay Area, up into Canada, and all the way across the Atlantic. It is a story with many key performance indicators of 2020: aggression, fear, suspicion, threats, shaming, displacement, conspiracy theories, a public-space shutdown, and a Change.org petition.

Fittingly enough for this turkey of a year, to use the old vaudeville term for a fiasco, it’s a story about an actual turkey. A three-foot-tall turkey named Gerald.

This may be Gerald, or it may be a lookalike who just happened to be strutting near the Rose Garden on Grand Avenue — a major urban thoroughfare — in March 2018, when I took his picture from a prudent distance.

Gerald liked to hang out with his avian lady friends at the Morcom Rose Garden, a seven-acre volunteer-tended park that has been pleasing visitors since it opened in 1932, a project of the New Deal Works Progress Administration. Nestled in a densely populated section of Oakland just a block from a major commercial street, the rose garden is “a birding hotspot,” according to the Golden Gate Audubon Society, where you might see hawks, wrens, warblers, scrub jays, and Steller’s jays. And, yes, wild turkeys.