Nathan Davidson
Meet Tom. Tom is a wild turkey who lives in East Amherst, NY. At the intersection of Klein and Paradise roads, he can be found pecking at tires, blocking entire lanes of traffic, and circling cars because he apparently owns the place. While he’s an incredibly adorable bully, he’s still a bully. People refuse to run him over because he’s such a local staple, but he doesn’t always make it exactly easy. So basically, he has the whole town in the palm of his talons.
“He’ll just walk up right in front of the cars… He’ll start going right by the tires and quite rankly it’s kind of dangerous. I’m surprised nobody’s had an accident trying to avoid the thing,” says local Steve Levy.
This turkey is simply a delight. Read how much of a menace this little guy is:
“Tom forced a woman to stop her car at Ayer and Klein roads then started circling it.”
I love the idea of a turkey stopping this thing that it probably thinks is a giant creature, then circling it to show dominance.
“… He’ll come right up to the window… He just won’t let you go,” said the woman he stopped.
Tom even has a Facebook page, where he encouraged people to consider Tofurky (which, if you’ve ever had it, is basically the same as turkey only it tastes like it was made out of landfill tires).
The “celebrity turkey” stops traffic on a regular basis, but not as often as he does in the Spring, when turkeys mate and he has to be dressed to the nines.
Some of his detractors include a nearby PE teacher who said “I’ve seen people almost get killed getting out of their car and monitoring to redirect traffic so they don’t run over the turkey.”
Tom is apparently most likely being fed by someone near that intersection, which is fine because turkeys are a species built to adapt to living around humans. So they’re great for suburbs and can thrive there. People are still surprised, though, that Tom is still alive.
“He’ll probably be hiding the next couple of days with Thanksgiving, but I just don’t understand how he’s never been hit.”
We eat about 44 million turkeys on Thanksgiving every year and New York alone has a population of about 200,000 wild ones.
Let’s hope Tom lives a long, dominant, and aggressively satisfying life.