Remember that old commercial, “It’s not nice to fool
Mother Nature?” Well, as a young child of about 12, I found out
first-hand why you shouldn’t fool Mother Nature. We had chickens,
turkeys, geese, and ducks; one of my jobs was to gather the eggs
except for the ones that my parents wanted to be left to sit and hatch
out babies. I, being 12 and easily bored, decided it would be
interesting to do a little egg switching. Dumb birds, they couldn’t
tell the difference between their eggs and any of the other birds’
eggs, so I put a turkey egg under the momma goose, a duck egg under a
momma chicken, snickering to myself everyday how dumb these birds
were, I mean the momma chicken didn’t notice that the duck egg was
three times bigger than hers!
Well, I laughed then, but I got a big pay back from
Mother Nature after the eggs hatched. At first, it was just so
hilarious to see Momma Chicken with her brood of baby chicks and one
baby duck and Momma Goose with her babies including one turkey… but it
wasn’t hilarious for long. I soon discovered that the joke was on me.
When the baby geese got big enough to start going for their swims,
baby turkey also went for his swim - big problem since turkeys can’t,
and therefore don’t, swim. My Mother firmly told me that since I was
the bright one who put the turkey egg under Momma Goose, it was my
responsibility to make sure my “turkey goose” did not drown. Seems
like every time I found something fun or interesting to do, Momma
Goose decided it was time for her and the kids to go for a swim. Off
I’d have to go, trekking after them, to the pond, wading in and
pulling out Mister Turkey Goose.
While Mister Turkey Goose was little and cute, it was
just an inconvenience, but as he grew into full turkey-hood, he got to
be rather hard to rescue, not to mention rather mad that I keep
pulling him out of the pond every time he and his brother and sister
geese went swimming. For a turkey-goose, he got pretty smart about
finding different ways to sneak off when my back was turned, and for a
big, fat turkey, he sure could run. It also apparently really
cheesed-off Momma Goose when I wrestled with her turkey boy,
cheesed-off to the point that she would start honking, calling the
whole goose family - all 16 of them - to her defense. Being flogged by
the entire goose clan, several times each day, had me looking like I
had gotten the worst of a bad fight, all the time.
