Trespassing turkeys: Tonawanda cemetery warns against feeding feathered visitors

“PLEASE,” urges a sign posted at the main entrance, “Do Not Feed The Turkeys. They are becoming a nuisance to our families.”

The wild turkeys aren’t exactly running wild at this Town of Tonawanda cemetery, but workers there don’t want guests doing anything to encourage the feathered infiltrators.

“You want to make sure that people are smart about it, right? You live in the suburbs, or you live in the city, you might not know turkeys the way I know turkeys,” said Gregg Prince, operations manager for Catholic Cemeteries of Buffalo, who is from Wyoming County. “You probably want to just leave him alone.”

He said he didn’t know how long the sign has been up but the cemetery, located between Delaware Avenue and Military Road south of Knoche Road, has dealt with turkeys for at least a decade.

A reporter’s visit to Mount Olivet on a recent afternoon found dozens of Canada geese foraging for food among the tombstones and headstones but no turkeys. However, the photographer assigned to this article briefly became trapped in his car by a small group of wild turkeys on Monday morning several blocks from Mount Olivet in the City of Tonawanda.

There are about 180,000 wild turkeys in New York, according to state figures, and the birds are a common sight in the Tonawandas.

The turkeys haven’t posed a serious problem to Mount Olivet and its visitors, Prince said, but they are harder than geese to move out of the way.

“I’m a country boy – I grew up out in Warsaw – turkeys can be a little more aggressive, right? And stubborn,” he said.

Still, the wild turkeys, like the deer that populate Holy Cross Cemetery in Lackawanna, tend to give people a wide berth and have figured out when and where it’s best to come out, he said.

The signs remain up to warn visitors they could encounter turkeys and to remind them to…