Turkeys gone wild

The turkeys are coming home to roost. News that a wild turkey is stalking the streets of New Bedford, Mass., pecking at cars and terrorizing pedestrians, is just the latest example of bad bird behavior that has swept the nation in recent years. Long a staple of a New England Thanksgiving, the wild turkey was hunted to extinction in Rhode Island, vanishing for more than 200 years until they were reintroduced from Vermont in 1980 and again from New York in 1994 to build up the state's now flourishing population. They seem to be everywhere, an estimated 6,000 in all, divided into roving mobs that torment the suburbs, especially in Jamestown and South County. Last year, a Middletown motorist got out of his car when a wild turkey scratched it, then bid a hasty retreat and filed a police report after the turkey kicked him. In recent years, turkeys across America have chased joggers, attacked postal workers, toppled cyclists from their bikes, dented cars, broken into homes and stores, halted traffic, knocked out power lines and assaulted a lab technician who was riding a Segway. But not all wild turkeys are a menace. At the South County Museum in Narragansett, turkeys come out of the woods every day to pay a social visit to the two Narragansett turkeys on site - Thompson the Tom and Greta the Gobbler. Museum director Jim Crothers said the turkeys get together for a few hours to gobble about this and that - like a turkey version of "The View."