Blood and Murmurations

Deepening our exchange with place / On the nature of extraction and reciprocity

A brief note: there’s a little bit of poultry gore in this one. Nothing I’d characterize as gratuitous, just honest. I’d like to think I handle it with respect. Folks who do not consume animals may still find value in this piece, but I think it would be respectful of me to mention it, in case they’d rather not. If you do eat animals, and you can’t appreciate even broad or vague details on how animals come to be food, you should probably stop eating them as well. I hope I am offering an honest appraisal of our seasonal life here, and raising turkeys in late November seems to necessitate some blood.

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European starlings murmur in flowing geometries over the fallow earth of harvested cornfields in the bleak wane of late November, a fluid constellation that stains the stubble with their inky, speckled shadows. There may be less than a bushel of grain dropped in the broad acreage, and by the bleeding light of an early sundown, the wheeling wave of birds gleans it. Bare and feasted upon like the carcasses of turkeys that I have now sold, the vulnerable skin of the land awaits the exchange of phosphorous rich bird-shit for its last few kernels, the trickling return of blood to the heart. In a heavenly sea of gray cloud-cover, the faintest red stains the western horizon, and the murmuration of starlings rises to the skeletons of elm and oak, faint clots subsumed into the darkness.

On the Monday before Thanksgiving, we harvested our turkey flock. Of course, that’s a euphemism for killing them. If you eat turkey, you really ought to try it yourself… it isn’t pleasant. I do not relish the act personally, but I like to perform it as best as I can, with a minimum of pain, struggle, and fear. We keep them together in a livestock trailer outfitted with perches, as they naturally prefer, and then, one by one, we catch them, fit their bulky bodies into a firmly mounted cone, pith their brains through their mouths with a sharp tool, test to see that they’re insensible by touching their eye, and then cut their carotid arteries quickly and cleanly.

Turkeys, particularly the big ones, contain what feels like a surprising amount of blood. It runs thick and steaming from the cut, clotting instantly, leaving my hands greasy and pruned by the time we’ve run through them all. I wipe it off on saturated pink strips of old t-shirts and scrape my hands as clean as I can under the cold drip of rain water in a bucket, but it clings to my cuticles and knuckle hairs until I can wash up more deeply when the day is done. Our working dog in training, Wanda, who is fairly attached to the turkeys, stands by to watch, licking the kill cone between birds, taking advantage of the grisly situation, as I suppose we all are, her muzzle speckled pink and crimson red.

A bucket full of turkey blood, gruesome as it may seem, is a thing of deep value. It can be reapplied unto the dirt from whence it was drawn, as a high-nitrogen amendment, either in our compost pile, or via the feeding of dogs and coyotes and swine. With extra dedication and labor it can be run through a sieve and collected upon its release, stirred until cool to keep from coagulating, and used to nourish humans in the form of sausages and spice cakes, should one choose to do so. It makes a wonderful finish coat on earth plaster. The possibilities are endless, but largely undesirable, at least to my palate.

After all the scalding and plucking and eviscerating and quality control and plastic shrink wrap and invoices and deliveries and clean-up, I am left to consider my own blood. I’ve shed a bit here in the last odd decade, but not a bucket’s worth. In the performance of my work, I probably make one small puddle of it a year, mishandling my scythe during sharpening, slipping with a grafting knife– mostly just the result of mindlessness or poor ergonomics. Even if I lost a finger, it wouldn’t be quite as much blood as I shed on a weekly occurrence in the killing time.

In the ditch near our killing cone, the jugular spray runs in fluid rivulets into frost-torn cracks, while sap recedes in the bare-limbed hedge and slumbering oak. We pack hundreds of pounds of flesh and fat and bone built from this dirt into shrink-seal plastic and sterile coolers and export it for a necessary sum of currency, mostly digital, that will not return to the heart of this place to feed microbes or become pregnant with fungal spores. Some frozen feathers squirm in the wind, and the innards of birds have been dutifully fed to our local scavengers. The starlings remember the importance of the exchange, as does the land. I will remember too, but it would seem the debt of blood I owe may be greater than I can provide.

I often think of the world below this plow-torn prairie, of the strata of glacial clay and occasional stones sunk beyond the reach of shallower roots, the lost bones of elk and bison and mammoth and people who paid their debt in the great exchange, who made their nativity complete in this cradle of earth. Were I to return to my place of origin and become subsumed in its strata, I suppose my blood would find little purchase between the asphalt and concrete and rebar upon which I was reared. Looking for my own resting place on this landscape, the best spots are already occupied by good old dogs, excellent companion goats, and the occasional noteworthy old hen. Death often leaves the dead in awkward places, and I suppose anywhere I drop will do, or at least I remember this while watching eagles pick deer carcasses clean in the barren, tilled bottomlands.

We take our heat from the woods, and our nurturance from the field. At times clumsily, without the knowledge of my forebears, I attempt to reciprocate. I plant trees. I steward the prairie. I justify my exports by considering my imports… at least until I consider their origin. At times, it feels like agriculture is largely the art of resource allocation– mobilizing fertility and water to the advantage of a yield, which is exported, and then, in each season, finding more clever, efficient, and cost-effective ways to keep this wide loop circulating. Synthetic fertilizer makes this easy in the short run, but in the long run, this loop is too wide, too thin, too brittle. Blood and bone and manure are a few of life’s certainties, markets and supply chains and petrochemical refining not so much. So I hedge my bets on shit and death.

The very real, physical loop of life begetting death begetting decay begetting fertility and then again begetting life is a clear and logical path for a middle-schooler to understand. The financial loop makes a lot less sense, at least to me. We would have everything we need, were it not for numbers in a bank account. But I need to pay my lease fees by year’s end, lest I be accused of living on stolen land twice, so our prized birds have found their way to dinner tables across the state, and somewhat relieved, somewhat saddened, I watch the starlings perch on tree limbs barren of turkeys.

I am left with a bucket of severed heads which must be fed out. Our dogs get a few, and somehow do not link these meaty trinkets with the birds they were charged in protecting the whole season, but in order to dissuade canine indigestion, I must bring the majority of them down to the woods, to scatter for the crepuscular scavengers that stalk the deep leaf litter. Along the draw, swinging my head bucket, I step over the stumps of oak we felled to build our life, alters of carbon festooned with turkey tail mushrooms and a squirrel’s middens of acorn crumbs and vacant shells. The bare stemmed seedlings of oak project through a mass of decay where the bones of tree limbs fade into the mossy duff. A patter of fleshy skulls bounces in the frozen leaves as I exchange some nitrogen and calcium with the oaks which fed our flock.

The flow of capital, however, is through a largely leaky, uni-directional artery. Like our dog, we’re grateful for our drippings, but the bulk of the exchange flows out past the feed mill and the row-croppers and equipment companies and seed companies and fuel companies and on into the cracked bucket of shareholder pockets. Always from the hungered earth to the prosperous few. In our case, selling largely direct-to-eater and using grain only as a necessary supplement to acorns and persimmons and grasshoppers, we get our muzzles pretty pink, a lot more than large-scale growers. But in any case, the land feels the pangs of extraction without reciprocal exchange. The loop of capital, as it currently operates, is like a snake cannibalizing its own ass, or parasitic vine strangling a host tree.

At dusk, I walk the ridgeline with an armload of brittle oak branches for kindling a fire in our stove. Stretching from the skin of the dirt and into the faded light is the silhouette of tangled, bare branches– the vascular appendages of hackberry and hedge and broad, thick arteries of tired elm, their tops stitched together with squirrel dreys. In dormancy, their snaking, veinous forms splay out like an open carcass, but I know that below the surface, carbon and sugars and microbiota are all dancing and murmuring and laying in wait, the pulse of circulating life faint but not extinguished. Shaking out the cold ash pan of our home’s heart into the slight wind, I crouch to earth, and lay a fire onto the splintered twigs once again.