Kayla Newby ’16 was simply sitting in her room doing homework last Thursday evening, when all of a sudden something smashed into her window. “Our shade was down, and I couldn’t tell what had caused the glass to shatter; my first thought was that it had been a bomb or something,” Newby wrote in an email to The Hoot. A turkey flew into the window and got himself stuck on the fifth floor of the Hassenfeld building in East Quad.
Newby ran to get her neighbor to help figure out what happened. They opened the shade to see the large bird trapped. “We saw it, [and] we both screamed, startling it so much it flapped its wings until the glass broke enough to free it from the window and it flew away,” wrote Newby.
The turkey was able to remove himself from the window, but the damage he left called for backup. “There was a lot of broken glass on the floor and on top of the heater next to the window. Facilities showed up probably less than 20 minutes after the call. They were very prompt. They immediately removed the larger pieces of glass and vacuumed the floor. Then they duct-taped what was left of the window so it wouldn’t break anymore, and they taped a large sheet of plexiglass up over the window,” wrote Newby.
Newby and her roommate Tiffany Mei ’16 were able to sleep in their own room that night.
The two sophomores weren’t the only ones to catch the turkey’s miscalculation. A video taken by Max Zaslove ’16 captures the turkey’s entire flight and crash. In the course of the past week, this video has gone viral. It has been featured on popular sites such as The Huffington Post, College Humor and Reddit. Zaslove’s YouTube video of the event has 322,790 views—a count that skyrocketed so high in the first few hours after being posted that YouTube couldn’t even give an exact number of views. Other accounts have re-posted the same video, but have not gotten nearly as many views. The closest competitor counts in at a little over 6,000 views, by an account called “wowie.”
Residents of East Quad stepped outside frequently to see the damage done to the window throughout the following days. While the real turkey was gone, the girls made a paper cutout of a turkey to stick on the window in its place.
