Turkey Blog~Tatiana’s Epic Love Story~Ktrina Wants to be Queen!

I’ve noticed that generally in flock birds where there is one male and numerous females, that the male will mate with all of them but have a favorite that will also be a companion. They will hang out together and most often be near to each other. In our flocks we refer to this bird as “the Bobiana” but some might call her a queen.

The old blue slate tom turkey on the hill has a favorite hen. Her name is Tosca. These are Tatiana’s parents. One day Ktrina and Tosca got in a terrible fight. Both of their faces were bloody and Stella had to get between them. We decided that it was so bad that we would need to separate the hens. Since Tosca was the queen on the hill we decided to bring Ktrina down to live with Tatiana and Misha. We wondered why they suddenly could not get along and came to the conclusion that Ktrina wanted to be queen. This may not be accurate but we will never know.

We put Ktrina in the outer enclosure to introduce her to Misha and Tatiana. Tatiana completely ignored her. When Ktrina and Misha first saw each other it was everything that I had hoped Tatiana’s epic love story would be. It was as if they ran to each other through a field of flowers then embraced as the sky exploded with a thousand stars. Within 5 minutes they had successfully mated and have been inseparable ever since. They are a bonded pair and Tatiana is kind of a third wheel.

We let her out of the enclosure into the pasture and she challenged Tatiana. They got in a pretty brutal hen fight. Misha made a lot of noise and tried to stay in between them. Before I got all the way down the hill, Tatiana had established that she was the queen. It surprised me that Tatiana won. She is smaller and younger than Ktrina. I think the final result of this battle was that Tatiana did not care about mate competition. It was fine if Ktrina stayed near Misha as long as she understood that Tatiana is queen of the pasture. So that was that, they never fought again.