A strange and fowl night

If one overlooks the fact that Chuck Ritter isn’t impoverished, ill or starving and never wished for it to happen, then his tale has all the makings of a beautiful Christmas story, albeit one that involves an unnecessary death.

Sitting in the third-storey living room of his Traverse City, Michigan, apartment, Ritter heard a sudden commotion coming from his bedroom. Living alone, the 83-year-old Ritter went to investigate. What he found, cut, bloodied and afraid, was a rather large turkey that had flown through his double-paned bedroom window.

As the frantic bird scattered feathers, glass shards and gore about the room, Ritter called Animal Control. A recorded message made it clear to Ritter they’d be no help, so he turned to a maintenance worker in his building. The pair tried to goad the wounded bird back the way it came in, but to no avail. Finally Ritter just grabbed the bird by its neck and hurled it out the window. It did not happily fly into the winter’s eve.

“He just fell on his back,” Ritter recalls. He says now he’ll probably donate his kill, which he estimates at about 25 pounds of deliciousness, to the Salvation Army.

by Scott Saxon