Sunday Review: My Life as a Turkey (TV)

Obligations of re-enactment

By Morris Dean

In My Life as a Turkey (2011, directed by David Allen), the possessive pronoun refers to Joe Hutto, a naturalist who made mother-turkey sounds over an incubating basket of wild-turkey eggs and so managed to be "imprinted" on the hatchlings, one-by-one, as they pecked their way out of the shells and looked upon his friendly, nurturing face. In doing that, Hutto took upon himself the moral obligation to spend all his days for over a year raising the young turkeys to adulthood and beyond, in a remote wilderness of northern Florida.

Quick description from Wikipedia:

    ...a television episode that premiered in 2011 in the UK on BBC (Season 30 of the series Natural World, August 1) and in the US on PBS (Season 30 of the series Nature, November 16). It won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Nature Programming. It was based on the book Illumination in the Flatwoods, by Joe Hutto, who also co-wrote and hosted the TV program.

    The Wikipedia article also says that the film is a re-enactment of the material described in the book, but there is no information about this in the film itself. We hope that a DVD offering might include bonus material describing the production. If the young turkeys shown in the film aren't the turkeys Hutto spent a year with, who are they, and what is their story?

    Part of the answer is available from an audio clip on the PBS website. It records the voice of nature photographer and actor Jeff Palmer, who plays Hutto in the film. In the audio clip, Palmer describes his own experience of imprinting after days of making his own mother-turkey sounds over the turkey actors' eggs. He compares the emotional impact of this to that of "catching" his daughter when she was born. He doesn't answer the question about how he fulfilled, or evaded, his own moral obligation to serve as the actor birds' mother. And Hutto had moved on, according to the film, to live with some mule deer in Wyoming – the subject of yet another PBS Nature program, apparently with Palmer again playing Hutto, to judge by the image on the PBS website.
    The film's narrative voice is, however, that of Hutto, who evidently had to "dub" his voice onto Palmer's mouth in the scenes depicting narration directly to the camera.
    Jeff Palmer, by the way, is not the actor of the same name who was born as David Zuloaga on March 27, 1975 and has appeared in pornographic films and magazines. Wikipedia had me going for a minute, for it doesn't have an entry for the Jeff Palmer who plays Joe Hutto in the film under review.

    The hour-long story was for me deeply moving, having – as I had – last month suffered dull moments of grief at the slaughter of 45 million turkeys in America for Thanksgiving, which might more aptly be called "Let's-Kill-&-Eat-Turkeys-Day" so far as the popular centerpiece of the Day's meals is concerned. Hutto acknowledges this at one point, noting that wild turkeys are not the "tame turkeys we grow for food," seeming to imply that they are less intelligent and less deserving of human mothering than his wild brood.

    I forget how many "words" of wild-turkey language Hutto says he learned (I believe it was in the twenties). I put the word in quotation marks because at least some of the vocals mean different things depending on the intonation.
    Hutto also maintains that he learned more from the turkeys than they learned from him. I can believe it. They basically needed only protection and care to reach independent adulthood; they seemed to already know all they needed to know as regards getting out of their shells, looking for their mother, eating plants & grasshoppers & other insects (the many shots of grasshoppers being picked off are striking , and I could imagine Palmer the photographer setting up his camera on a grasshopper and waiting for a turkey to come along...), displaying feathers for courtship, recognizing which snakes were to be avoided and which four-footed animals they could safely play with, flying at some point early on, ascending eventually to the branches of trees to roost (where Joe joined them until after dark), and mating.

Joe Hutto himself

    But Hutto learned all that we are taught by the film, and more, including what having a year of life as a turkey feels like. I know that I myself am not up to that obligation and that my imaginings of it are a pale shadow.

If your own local PBS TV station hasn't yet aired My Life as a Turkey, check their listings. If it has aired it, but you missed it, then you're in luck: we are told that you can view it on the PBS website.

Copyright © 2014 by Morris Dean