Combative Turkey Terrorizes Tenants in Bloomfield Hills

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Of all the turkey tales that will be told this Thanksgiving, this one may be the most terrifying for tenants of a Bloomfield Hills office complex.

About 10 wild turkeys have roosted behind an office complex and one of them is behaving aggressively toward tenants.

Mary Marx, an office manager at a law firm at the Governor’s Place complex, told The Detroit News that the angry bird stalked her as she went to the mailbox.

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“I said, ‘Hi turkey,’ and he started following me. I looked back and he was gaining on me,” Marx said.

She was saved by a cup of coffee another tenant splashed in the direction of the turkey “and he ran away,” she said.

One of Marx’s coworkers, Lynn Rosenthal, said stealth is her best defense.

An official with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources told Beachum & Roeser, the management company for the complex, their best defense may be “gentle hazing, where you re-establish your dominance over turkeys.”

You can chase the birds, clap your hand or make other loud noises, open an umbrella near them, squirt them with water — really anything that might scare them off,” Holly Vaughn Joswick, the DNR’s wildlife outreach technician, wrote in an email to Beachum & Roeser.

This isn’t the first story of wild turkeys running amok in Michigan. Last summer, University of Michigan students made a social media game of taking selfies with a turkey that scared students, stopped traffic, tried to board buses and generally made a nuisance of itself.

» Photo by Bill Dalton via Flickr