Steger resident Kate Pohrte remembers first spotting the village’s most notorious recent resident roughly a mile southwest of the intersection of Chicago and Steger roads.
“It was something you don’t see every day,” she said of the large bird believed to be a wild turkey.
Pohrte said Monday that she first saw the bird across 37th Street, “hanging around in their yard” around 8:30 a.m. May 18.
Realizing the presence of a free-range turkey was “definitely cool news,” Pohrte and others took to social media. Word spread and the bird became a local attraction, she said. “Even the police stopped and were laughing and taking pictures.”
By Saturday, however, officers had tired of fielding calls from concerned residents who wanted the bird relocated. Police took to social media to announce the Illinois Department of Conservation had advised them “to just leave the turkey alone … the bird will relocate to another area when it is ready.
“This is a wild bird just like any other bird,” the post continued. “Give it its space and use caution around it.”
More Top Picks Chainsaws
Meanwhile, the bird crossed Stella Boulevard, heading to the yards of Grecia Rojo and Sara Ishmael.
Rojo said the bird made its presence known to her early one morning when she went outside to check why her dog was barking.
“He was trying to get in my yard. It was the weirdest thing ever,” she said.
Separated from her small dog by a chain link fence, the turkey “came back twice,” acting “like he owned the yard. He wouldn’t let me get in my yard. He was all tough; it was hilarious,” she said, particularly when her dog would try to catch it.
Rojo discovered the bird was roosting on her fence and “would literally stay there all night, even though it was raining.”
Ishmael, speaking Monday, said a couple of her friends tried to catch the bird, “but they couldn’t.
“She ran away from them,” she said, adding, “I say ‘she’ because my father said it looks like a hen turkey, not a tom.”
The Illinois Department of Natural Resources says the eastern wild turkey is one of six recognized subspecies of turkey in the United States and the only subspecies found in Illinois.
The state agency describes females as typically 2.5 to 3 feet tall, weighing 8 to 12 pounds.
“Both sexes have dark, iridescent feathers that display shades of bronze, red, purple, blue and green,” the IDNR Web site states. “However, hens have an overall lighter appearance because their breast feathers are tipped with brown.”
The IDNR site noted turkeys are known to move into urban areas from open lands.
That pretty much describes the area where the bird appeared — on the village’s Will County side near the point where Halsted Boulevard becomes Stella Boulevard and a few blocks inside Steger village limits, with acres of open land between it and Crete, to the south.
But not everyone agrees the bird is a turkey.
Steger Deputy Police Chief Patrick Rossi, for one, said a flock of turkey vultures hangs out a few blocks to the west of that area, and he wondered if the bird had strayed from there.
Whatever the bird is, no one seems to have seen it lately.
Ishmael last saw it Friday, setting on a fence.
“She didn’t seem to be threatened or afraid, but she was shivering. You could tell she was wet.”
Rojo recalled her encounter with the bird as a once-in-a lifetime experience. “I had never seen a turkey in my life,” she said, beaming at the memory.
Dennis Sullivan is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.