Turkey

The apple of its mother's eye: My Life as a Turkey, BBC2. Photograph: Brian Snyder/Reuters

Joe Hutto's life changed when a local farmer in the Florida flatlands where he lives left a stainless steel dog bowl full of wild turkey eggs on the porch of his cabin. Joe put them in an incubator, and waited. Some weeks later, cracks began to appear. This is the crucial time: "imprinting" only occurs in the first few moments after hatching. So Joe put his face down to the level of the opening eggs and the first poult emerged, wet and confused. Joe made a chirping, clucky noise, the poult looked him square in the eye, "and something very unambiguous happened in that moment".

The little turkey stumbled and crawled across to Joe, and huddled up against his face. It recognised Joe as its mother. In the next few hours, Joe became mother to 15 more baby turkeys and remained so for the next 18 months. My Life as a Turkey: Natural World Special (BBC2) tells that story.

It's not hard to see how the little birds were taken in. Joe's moustache does look a bit like feathers, he has a long scraggy neck, an understanding of the forest, and a tentative, birdlike walk. He takes them out, to catch their first grasshoppers; he teaches them how to roost. For Joe, as for any mother, parenthood is an emotional rollercoaster ride. There is the joy of seeing his babies grow, but almost constant worry. Grief too, when one is taken by a rat snake, and another by a hawk, and two more get sick (bird flu?) and die.

Adolescence arrives with all its associated problems. The males start fighting; only the toughest will get to mate. "I had no way of knowing how I was going to be part of this rite of passage," says Joe. Steady now, Joe, let's not take this too far, you're not supposed to mate with any of them. For one, they're your children. They're also turkeys. That would be doubly wrong. Sometimes I think Joe spends too much time alone in the forest.

There's further tragedy; his favourite female – Sweet Pea – is killed, her own eggs smashed and eaten. No grandchildren for Joe. Then one of the males turns on him, for no apparent reason (my own theory is that Turkey Boy suddenly realises his mother is a man). And all the others quite literally fly the nest, for ever. "For weeks and months I would go out in to our old area," says Joe. "I would sit for hours sometimes, fully expecting for someone to walk in, a familiar face. And no one ever came." Interesting how Joe says "someone" and "no one".

I love a beautifully shot wildlife film as much as anyone, and this one is very beautiful – oak trees, swamps, misty southern sunrises. Even the turkeys, if not beautiful, have something endearing about them. I would have liked to have known more about the filming, maybe one of those how-we-made-it appendages you get at the end of a lot of natural history docos these days. The film is based on Joe's book, Illumination in the Flatwoods, about his experiment. So it must be re-enactment. That can't be the real Sweat Pea, or the real Turkey Boy, they're turkey actors. Joe must have had to gain the trust of a whole new brood. The hawk, the snakes, the deer, the squirrels too, all animal actors. Excellent performances all round. Unless a crew dropped by from time to time, during Joe's 18 months of mothering. No, they would never have caught all those key events. Anyway, I'd like to have been told.

My Life as a Turkey isn't simply a wildlife film though. It's not just about wild animals, it's about one man's relationship with wild animals, and that's what makes it so fabulous. Serious animal behaviourists may not agree, but if you throw a human being in there, it all suddenly becomes a lot more interesting. I'm thinking Ring of Bright Water, Gorillas in the Mist, I'm definitely thinking Werner Herzog's brilliant Grizzly Man about a man named Tim whose friendship with bears went wrong and he ended up inside one. My Life as a Turkey has something of Grizzly Man about it – a man obsessed, alone in a beautiful place, living with wild animals. But, although Joe was attacked, he didn't end up inside one of his turkeys thankfully. There would have been a certain irony to that, especially if it had happened at Thanksgiving.

Anyway, it's a lovely film – beautiful, charming, funny, sad, thought-provoking even. What thoughts did it provoke in me? That I need to go and see my mum.