Turkey Invasion

Published: December 09, 2007 09:46 am print this story email this story

Turkey trots through third-story window

By Vanessa McCray
vmccray@record-eagle.com

TRAVERSE CITY -- Chuck Ritter is talking a lot of turkey after a 25-pound wild Tom crashed through his third-story bedroom window.

Ritter, 83, was relaxing Saturday inside his Fitzhugh Drive apartment in Traverse City when he heard a loud bang. Then thrashing.

"I had no idea," he said. "I thought it was next-door."

He jolted up from his living room perch, opened his bedroom door and discovered a large turkey careening about the carpeted room. Ritter called for reinforcements. He tried Grand Traverse County Animal Control, but he said he was met with a recorded message indicating it did not help with wild animals.

On-call maintenance worker Joe Battaglia received word about 11:30 a.m. and arrived to find the turkey still flapping around the bedroom. Battaglia had never responded to a call like this.

"Turkeys -- you don't see them jetting across the sky," he said.

Battaglia and Ritter went to work. One grabbed a fishing pole, the other a yellow broomstick. The two tried to poke and prod the turkey toward the window. Finally, after about half an hour of wrestling, Ritter cornered the bird, grabbed it by the neck and threw it out the window.

"He just fell on his back," Ritter said.

Afterwards, the bedroom looked like a TV show crime scene. Blood smeared the white walls. Tufts of dark feathers and shards of glass covered the floor and scattered under the pillows. The turkey, on its ill-fated flight, smashed two glass panes and bent the window frame.

The ruckus interrupted what otherwise might have been a quiet day at the housing complex, where down the hall several ladies strung Christmas lights. Concerned neighbors stopped by to check on Ritter, who along with Battaglia escaped the ordeal unharmed. The turkey wasn't so lucky.

Listeners gobbled up the turkey tale each time Ritter repeated it. The big bird's brown plumaged body laid inside a grocery cart parked in the hallway outside his apartment door. Ritter planned to donate the bird, which he estimated weighed at least 25 pounds, to The Salvation Army.

"I'd like to find a needy family. I know a lot of people could use it" for dinnner, he said.

But first, Ritter wanted to pluck out a few tail feathers as souvenirs.