WINTER HARBOR — Thanksgiving can’t come soon enough for local residents terrorized throughout the summer, and now fall, by an unusually aggressive tom turkey.

The male has stalked walkers — most of whom now stroll with a stick — and schoolchildren getting off the school bus.

One Main Street resident, Pam Broderick, said several weeks ago she and her husband, Roger Fisher, heard a loud banging on their side door.

It was a friend and neighbor.

“It was 7:30 on a Sunday morning,” said Broderick, who lives across from Hammond Hall. “She was pounding at the door.”

The woman was standing on the top step with tom pacing below, his tail feathers in full flourish, his head bobbing.

The turkey, Broderick said, held his ground for several minutes after the friend sought refuge in their home.

The woman did not want to be identified.

A few days later, a visitor to Broderick’s home was jogging on nearby Beach Avenue and found herself being tailed by the feathered fiend.

“At first I thought he was ornamental,” said Tanya Lapierre of Oaxaca, Mexico. “Then he started chasing me.”

She squirted him with her water bottle, but he kept coming. Her husband, Ralph Gault, and Fisher arrived soon after in a van and picked her up.

Kelsey Sullivan, the game bird wildlife biologist for the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, chuckled while providing an explanation for the turkey’s behavior.

“It sounds like he has a lot of testosterone flowing,” Sullivan said. “He thinks people are turkeys and are a threat to his area. It’s all related to breeding with a hen.”

He said complaints usually are made during mating season in the spring when tom turkeys chase cars or peck at glass doors when they see their own reflection.

They furl their feathers, he said, to increase their attractiveness to hens.

Sullivan estimated the tom was about 2 years old, judging by the length of the thin, black beard-like hair hanging from his chest.

He speculated the problem might be exacerbated if local residents are feeding the turkeys, which makes the birds more comfortable around humans.

But despite the annoyance, Sullivan isn’t giving anyone permission to serve tom on a platter.

“We wouldn’t recommend anybody other than someone from the department come out and get him,” he said.

The turkey can peck, but worse than that, he can jump on someone and drive in the 1-inch spurs at the back of his feet and legs.

“The spurs are what they use when they challenge someone,” Sullivan said. “You could get a pretty serious scratch or puncture wound if they hit you right.”

He cautioned walkers to carry a stick and poke the turkey if he pesters them.

Sullivan also was making arrangements to have a colleague swing by and throw a net over the menacing bird.

“We would take it to a wildlife management area where no one is around,” he said.