Wild turkeys gobbled up Staten Island straphangers’ time on Monday, after a flock fouled up service on the Staten Island Railway.
A train crew near the Old Town station first reported the fowl around 2:30 p.m. Monday afternoon, sources told the Daily News. The crew reported that an unspecified number of turkeys were on the tracks west of the station.
“All efforts to move the turkeys are ineffective,” read an internal summary reviewed by The News.
MTA spokeswoman Joana Flores told The News that it took several blasts of the train horn, but the birds eventually scattered.
Shortly before 4 p.m., a second train radioed in that it had also encountered a barricade of birds, and the MTA alerted customers to delays in both directions due to a flock of fowl near St. George — again cleared by judicious application of the horn.
Monday’s delays are not the year’s first poultry postponement.
Last month, the Staten Island Advance reported that a tempestuous turkey briefly faced off with an MTA bus at the intersection of Victory Boulevard and Forest Avenue.
Richmond County’s wild turkey population has been documented since the 1990s, but the population has grown into the hundreds in recent years.