Yuen: Can urban turkeys smell your fear?

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They say wild turkeys, even the ones in your neighborhood, are somewhat intelligent. They can solve puzzles. They can use city crosswalks. They can recognize faces.

So can they smell fear in humans? Do they bully you if they think you’re weak?

Lili Korbuly-Johnson is starting to think so. She says the turkeys in her St. Louis Park neighborhood seem to have it out for her. Earlier this winter, while carrying a tote bag of organics recycling from her condo to a public drop-off bin, she was antagonized by an especially aggressive bird. It chased her into the street, puffing up its feathers.

The turkey gobbled. Korbuly-Johnson screamed. Then she bolted. A man driving by, noticing her trying to escape, offered to give her a ride home.

“It was one of the scariest things I have ever encountered. I was terrified, literally so terrified,” she said. “It’s just the boldness, the feathers fluffing up.”

Reports of aggressive turkeys are not uncommon. A couple of years ago, they became such a nuisance for letter carriers in a northeast Minneapolis neighborhood that the Postal Service urged residents in a letter not to feed them. One carrier in Richfield said a turkey sliced up his hands — as well as his pants.

Wild turkeys, once considered on the cusp of extinction in Minnesota due to hunting and habitat loss, are an emblem of urban resilience. They haunt our backyards. They dawdle across the street, unaware of the traffic jams they’ve created. But sometimes, they are just nasty.

To hear Korbuly-Johnson tell it, her encounter on the way to the composting bin escalated quickly.

“He went over to my right side and got faster and louder,” she says. “I dumped the bag on the ground and said, ‘If you’re hungry, just take it.’ He kept following me. I yelled at him. ‘LEAVE ME ALONE! GO AWAY! WHAT’S YOUR PROBLEM?’”

In the middle of telling her story along the walking path where it happened, she notices something familiar: a canvas tote bag filled with food scraps. It’s her bag, still in the snow where she had apparently abandoned it a week earlier while screaming and running for her life.

Cute story, one for the ages. But then, several weeks later, she reached out to me again. There was another incident.

I thought this was a good data point suggesting that turkeys were becoming more aggressive in urban and suburban environments. Experts say that feeding the birds habituates them to humans, leading to a higher likelihood of unpleasant encounters.

But Roy Churchwell, resident gamebird consultant for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, says the turkeys aren’t necessarily getting more aggressive. They simply are aggressive. Within the turkey world, as food becomes scarcer at the start of winter, they often form a larger group and establish a pecking order, he said.

A sense of dominance, particularly among younger males, can translate into how the bird interacts with humans. They might notice if you are spooked or give off “subordinate” energy.

“As they get to know individuals, they can recognize certain people,” Churchwell said. “They can sense if someone’s backing down or being dominant. If you have an individual turkey who’s being aggressive, it’s good for everyone to be aggressive back.”

If a turkey is trying to run you down, Churchwell advises using a garden hose to squirt water at it. Or swat at it with a broom. “Whatever you have available,” he added, “to show you are more dominant.”

Zuk, author of the upcoming book “Outsider Animals,” said the birds can be surprisingly theatrical, particularly as they sidle up to shiny objects.

“When they’re pairing up and getting ready to breed, they will display to each other or to car windows, if they see their reflections in the side of a car,” she told my colleague Chris Hewitt. “There was one in my neighborhood that developed an affection for a car tire rack, and it was poignant. You know how it is when you’re in love with someone and they’re not going to love you back? So sad.”

Zuk clarifies she’s “not a turkey expert, just a turkey fan,” and notes that the birds are mostly aggressive toward each other, not toward people.

While turkeys do not have teeth, their strong beaks can peck at you. They can kick you with a thornlike projection on the back of their leg, called a spur. They can also strike you with their wings. In western Wisconsin, a man was sent to the hospital to get a tetanus shot after a bird clawed him. Another man described what happened when he tried to stand his ground.

“I kicked him in the face, but that just made him more mad,” he told a TV station.

As for Korbuly-Johnson, she’s made peace with the possibility that the birds simply don’t like her. On her walks to the compost bin, she now carries a broom.