Then his friends Helge and Carol Swanson intervened, dragging the shy woodsman to Cascades Park. Hutto wasn’t going to go, assuming Coolidge would be “inundated,” as he says. They landed here about a year after their fateful 2016 reunion at Word of South, the literary and music festival in downtown Tallahassee, where the performer had come to read from her memoir, Delta Lady (Harper).
Hutto and Coolidge have lived on this 8-acre patch of land, part of a long stretch of old plantation property a few miles south of the Georgia state line, for the past two years. I came to talk wild turkey but what I found was much harder to tame-love shared between two madly accomplished individuals whose paths led them both through the spotlight to where they are now and where they might never have expected to find themselves again: together. “What’s the other subtitle?” she prompts him, with a knowing glance. Seated next to him on a sofa in their den is Rita Coolidge, two-time Grammy Award-winning singer and songwriter, who married Hutto, her college sweetheart, a year ago after decades apart. The book in progress, Hutto says, will be called The Light in the Eye of the Deer: The Conscious Imperative in Biology. Hutto and mule deer “Peep” examining Hutto’s Emmy in 2013. “I’m basically going through different plants and animals and giving examples of how not only are they aware … but they are brilliantly aware in their particular unique way,” he says of his project. “Every living thing is inhabited by a sense of its own identity,” begins Hutto, the author of several books including his most widely known, Illumination in the Flatwoods: A Season With the Wild Turkey (Lyons Press). He loves to hop into rich and colorful discourse on the mysteries and revelations of the natural world, which he’s surrounded by daily in his home outside Tallahassee, where he is writing a new book, an expansive summing-up of a lifetime of practice as a naturalist, archaeologist, wildlife biologist and artist. Hutto, a lean and ease-making fellow whose biological clock seems to have paused a couple of decades shy of his current 74 years, uses the term to describe his free-flowing thought process. Right now, though, he’s pulling me down the proverbial rabbit hole. He has spent the better part of 40 years embedded in a range of habitats-from the brackish marshes of the Florida Panhandle to the wide-open prairies of the Great Plains-forging intimate bonds with, among other creatures, wild turkeys, bighorn sheep and mule deer.
Joe Hutto may be a human being who walks on two legs, yet he has nurtured a nearly cellular understanding of the way animals perceive, connect and communicate. And not only for that, of course, although that is the thing that has brought him a big pinch of popular recognition, but for a lifetime of immersive endeavors in the wild.
I have come to the edge of a swamp to talk to a man who is famous for talking to turkeys, for talking as a turkey. Joe Hutto and a herd of mule deer, heading out in the mountains in Wyoming circa 2014 Photography courtesy Joe Hutto