Q: Why did the turkey cross the road?
A: What road? Can't you see I'm busy here??
(Wild Turkey, Marin Headlands)
In a couple of hours, we're heading down to our friends' home for their annual Thanksgiving get together. They're our neighbors at our cabin, so it will be one last chance to hang out with the feathered neighbors (neighbirds?) that we know and love down there - the Steller's jays, acorn woodpeckers, chickadees, nuthatches, band-tailed pigeons, townsend's warblers and the recently arrived varied thrushes. (The black-headed grosbeaks headed out a few months ago.)
We'll also be saying hello and goodbye simultaneously to one other bird (roasted). Gobble gobble.
Not far from the cabin is Quail Hollow Ranch, a splendid county park. The ranch was owned by the Lane family at the time they were publishing Sunset magazine, and still has many of the buildings from that time - it was a showplace for "Western Living". The park has a great variety of habitats in a fairly small area - some oak woodland, a riparian corridor, open grassland, a pond and the unique local sandhill habitat. And it's well named - the place is flush with quail.
But the quails' larger cousins can be seen strutting around like they owned the place.
I guess they were feeling festive. One of them appeared to be practicing the Turkey Trot...
A bunch of them were just hanging out by the pond. They seemed to be enjoying themselves and spent quite a while there, drinking. They drank quite a bit, actually....
... one was running around like a turkey with its head cut off...
... and a few of them ended up under the table.
Hopefully they're not too out of it... It's okay if they're a little hungover, I guess, but they don't want to end up leftover.
After all, not everyone with Turkey in their name has their best interests in mind.