“Thanksgiving: A Time to Celebrate the Remarkable Nature of Birds” is a wonderful and timely essay honoring the beauty and dignity of birds in the November 2009 edition of The Order of the Earth, page 12. This essay, by attorney Valerie J. Stanley, pays a special tribute to turkeys, pigeons, and the partridge family of birds known as chukars, of whom moving personal stories are related. UPC’s favorite Thanksgiving recipe, “Mrs. Gobble-Good’s Golden Brown Pie,” appears on page 14.

The essay features UPC President Karen Davis’s cultural history of the turkey, More Than a Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual, and Reality. Praised by The New Yorker for “starkly depicting the historical disfigurement of the turkey,” More Than a Meal contains a rich gathering of scholarly and personal observations about turkeys from the late Middle Ages to the present, several of which are quoted in the essay, which notes for example the “mysterious empathy” of turkeys with one another under duress, their instant “transplanting of sound” to each other in the trees, and a touching account of a group of young turkeys dropping from their roosting limbs at dawn and starting up a “strange little dance, a joyful, happy dance, expressing an exuberance,” in Joe Hutto’s Illumination in the Flatwoods: A Season with the Wild Turkey.

United Poultry Concerns is delighted to post this beautiful essay by Valerie J. Stanley, Esq., Adjunct Professor of Animal Law at the University of Maryland School of Law and Georgetown University Law Center and an attorney specializing in wild horse and burro protection. We thank Valerie and also Iona Connor, publisher-editor of The Order of the Earth - “The Nation’s First Global Warming Newspaper.” To learn more including how to subscribe, click on www.theorderoftheearth.com.

Please Note: “Mrs. Gobble-Good’s Golden Brown Pie” and other great holiday & year-round recipes are available in Karen Davis’ cookbook, Instead of Chicken, Instead of Turkey: A Poultryless “Poultry” Potpourri. This cookbook along with More Than a Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual, and Reality and other outstanding books can be purchased at www.upc-online.org/merchandise/.

Please Note: United Poultry Concerns’ 19th Annual Thanksgiving Open House will be held at our sanctuary in Machipongo, Virginia on Saturday, November 28 from 2-5pm. For information about our Open House and other upcoming events, click on: www.upc-online.org/alerts/.