FCG BETHEL - Film "My Life As A Turkey" - DINNER AND SOCIAL

Activity Type: Hiking, Local Walks, & Trail Running | Hiking
Difficulty: 1 - Accessible
Trip Leader(s): Fiona Nicholson, Tom Carruthers
Registration Type: Show & Go
Please Click Here to RSVP:https://activities.outdoors.org/a5UUN0000021qLB
Audience: Everyone

Description: SHOW AND GO - Pay at the door!
Film "My Life As A Turkey" by Joe Hutto - Living with a brood of wild turkeys for 18 months, nationally recognized naturalist and wildlife artist Joe Hutto describes how the chicks imprinted on him the moment they came out of the egg leading him on a touching and life changing journey.
Joe Hutto is a nationally recognized naturalist and wildlife artist. He lives in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming and is currently studying the largest wild-sheep herd in North America: the bighorn sheep of the Whiskey Mountain Herd. He is the author of Illumination in the Flatwoods, the book that inspired the film, My Life as a Turkey. Preview

No Turkeys have been harmed in the making of the film. No Turkeys will be at the meeting. Come on down and share the Holiday cheer and share your amazing or turkey stories with fellow AMCers.

Doors open 6:00pm, Appetizers 6:15pm, Dinner 6:45pm, Film 7:30pm
$12 AMC members, $15 non-AMC members - pay at the door. Please Bring a Dessert to share

No reservations necessary, just pay cash at door. However, please email ThomasCarruthers@yahoo.com as a heads up for planning purposes for ordering enough food.

Become an AMC member now as there is a 50% discount deal: Join AMC with a 50% discount

Venue: St Thomas Church, 95 Greenwood Ave, Bethel CT 06801 Park on Greenwood Ave or in Caraluzzi’s PL. Directions

More on the Film: My Life as a Turkey describes how Hutto raised a brood of wild turkeys. Hutto narrates over a recreation of his time living with turkeys with Jeff Palmer playing Hutto. They imprinted on him as they came out of the egg. He then led them on walks through the Florida woods. He describes how he learned their language and was impressed by their instincts and native intelligence. Eventually, after about a year, they became independent of him. The film shows footage of turkeys at all these ages, and is a re-enactment of the material described in Hutto's book.

In order to get the footage of Palmer living with wild Turkeys, PBS recreated Hutto's entire experiment over the course of a year with actor Jeff Palmer imprinting and living with the turkeys. Hutto stated in an interview that they were extremely lucky to have turkeys that had similar personalities to the ones in his book. “Their language and their understanding of the ecology shows a remarkable intelligence. But their ability to understand the world goes much further than just communication. I came to realize that these young turkeys in many ways were more conscious than I was. I actually felt a sort of embarrassment when I was in their presence - they were so in the moment - and ultimately their experience of that manifested in a kind of joy that I don’t experience and I was very envious of that. I was learning new things about turkeys everyday. But this was not just about how they live their lives - these animals were showing me how to live my life also. We do not have a privileged access to reality. So many of us live either in the past or in the future - and betray the moment. And in some sense we forget to live our lives - and the wild turkeys were aways reminding me to live my life. I think as humans we have this peculiar predisposition to be always thinking ahead - living a little bit in the future - anticipating the next minute, the next hour, the next day - and we betray the moment. Wild turkeys don’t do that. They are convinced that everything that they need, all their needs, will be met only in the present moment and in this space. The world is not better half mile through the woods, it’s not better an hour from now, and it’s not better tomorrow - that this is as good as it gets. So they constantly reminded me to do better, and to not live in this abstraction of the future, which by definition will never exist. And so we sort of betray our lives in the moment and the wild turkeys reminded me to be present, to be here.”

"I learned many things - but maybe the most important was that we are essentially unaware of the overwhelming complexity that exists all around us. And I’ll never see the world in the same way again." - Joe Hutto

Reminder: Please click the RSVP link above to register!