No More Squawking about the Campus Turkey
This just in. Turk Turkee is history. No more appearances on YouTube. No more plugs on CNBC. No more ink from BusinessWeek or the Boston Globe. No more Facebook site called “HBS Students for the Removal of the Turkey.” Rumor has it that, in a private ceremony, the School recently conferred the wild fowl an honorary degree, whereupon she headed south to Wall Street with a clutch of updated résumés. Or was that Capitol Hill?
In case you missed the flap about Turk, she moved in without invitation about a year ago and, for a while at least, charmed passersby with her unexpected presence. But the charm wore off as complaints of turkey aggression mounted. Unprovoked, she chased faculty, students, kids, and even an intrepid reporter, who caught the episode on film that quickly found its way — duhh! — to YouTube. Wild turkeys, it seems, can be just as territorial as humans, perhaps more so. And Turk definitely staked a claim to the HBS campus. But a little aggression wasn’t enough to run afoul of state law that protects wild creatures from relocation just to soothe jangled human nerves.
Alas, perhaps the celebrity status Turk attained during the mid-October Centennial Global Business Summit, when the press took notice and filed stories, went to her head. If anything, she became more aggressive and finally crossed the line separating irksome from menacing, whereupon her campus privileges were officially — and terminally — revoked. It remains to be seen whether any of Turk’s estimated 23,000 winged counterparts strutting around the state will move in to take her place.
