Talking Turkey - The man who communicates with gobblers

Joe Hutto, who is sixty-one, has spent most of his waking life looking at wild turkeys. He may have looked at more of them than any other living American, with the “possible exception” of Lovett E. Williams, Jr., a wildlife biologist, and the bird’s principal, and probably only, life-long authority. Hutto is a trained wildlife biologist, too. He is an archeologist as well. He has also managed a zoo in Panama City (“heavy on the reptiles”) and a ranch in Wyoming (a thousand head of cattle), and been an elk-hunting guide, a competitive springboard diver, a dog handler (Labradors), a horse trainer, a landscape painter, an antiquities scuba diver, and a venomous-snake catcher (three dollars a foot for rattlers, a dollar for water moccasins). But mainly he has been a student of the wild, especially birds, and has come up with some surprisingly unconventional ways of conducting his studies...[Read More]