Turkey (bird)

• 1. Introduction

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  Turkeys belong to the genus Meleagris, and only two species survive: the wild turkey of North America and the ocellated turkey of Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. Each ranks among the largest birds in its home range, and the group is one of the heaviest in the order Galliformes. Their lineage first evolved in North America more than 20 million years ago.

  Yet the bird wears the name of a country it never came from. Why does a North American animal carry that label? How did a species once counted in the millions come so close to vanishing? And what is the fleshy ornament that hangs from a male's face, and why do females and rival males both pay attention to it?

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• 2. A Borrowed Name

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  William Strickland, an English navigator, was granted a coat of arms in 1550 that included a "turkey-cock in his pride proper". He was the man who had introduced the bird into England.

  Guineafowl, an African bird, were the first animals to be called turkeys. They reached Europe by way of Turkey, which explains the label. The name began as a shortening of turkey cock and turkey hen. After English colonies were established in the New World, the name moved to the superficially similar North American bird. That bird is only a distant relative of the guineafowl.

  William Shakespeare used the word in Twelfth Night, which is believed to date from 1601 or 1602. He gave it no explanation, which suggests that audiences already knew it well.

  Poult, the term for an infant turkey, is used interchangeably with chick.

  In 1758, the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus created the genus Meleagris in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae. He drew the name from the Ancient Greek meleagris, which means guineafowl, so the old mix-up survives in the scientific name too. The type species is the wild turkey, Meleagris gallopavo. Which family the genus belongs in is a question scientists have answered differently over time.

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• 3. Family Tree and Fossils

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  Pheasants, partridges, francolins, junglefowl and grouse all share a family with the turkey, the Phasianidae. The grouse are the closest cousins, and the two groups sit together in the tribe Tetraonini. Many authorities have treated turkeys as their own family, the Meleagrididae. A 2007 genomic analysis of a retrotransposon marker instead places them within Phasianidae.

  About 23 million years ago, in the Early Miocene, the first turkey relatives appear in the fossil record. Rhegminornis, found at Bell in the United States, is probably a basal turkey. Proagriocharis, from Lime Creek, is a more modern bird that does not much resemble known turkeys. Both were much smaller birds. A fossil from Westmoreland County, Virginia, dates to the Late Miocene and resembles Meleagris, but it cannot be assigned to a genus.

  Turkey bones are sturdy and turn up often, and individual turkeys vary widely. Paleontologists therefore described a great many species within Meleagris, and many are now treated as junior synonyms. One well-documented species, the California turkey Meleagris californica, died out recently enough that early human settlers hunted it. It has been suggested that hunting and the climate change at the end of the last glacial period combined to finish it off.

  Othniel Charles Marsh described the Oligocene fossil Meleagris antiquus in 1871. Later work moved it to the genus Paracrax, first as a cracid and soon after as a bathornithid in the group Cariamiformes. It left the turkeys entirely.

  In 2010, a team of scientists published a draft sequence of the domestic turkey genome. A improved version published in 2023, resolved by haplotype, confirmed a large inversion on the Z chromosome that other Galliformes lack. It also found new structural variations between the two parent haplotypes, which offer possible target genes for breeding.

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• 4. Domesticated Twice

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  Huehxōlō-tl is the Classical Nahuatl word for turkey, and its Spanish form, guajolote, is still used in modern Mexico. People there also use the general term pavo. Turkeys were likely first domesticated in pre-Columbian Mexico, where they carried cultural and symbolic weight.

  Mayan aristocrats and priests appear to have felt a special connection to ocellated turkeys. Ideograms of those birds appear in Mayan manuscripts.

  Bernal Díaz del Castillo and Father Bernardino de Sahagún, both Spanish chroniclers, described the vast markets of Tenochtitlán, called tianguis. Among the many foods on offer, they noted tamales made of turkeys, iguanas and other ingredients.

  The record of domestication reaches back to at least 800 BC, when the indigenous people of Mexico were raising the bird. By 200 BC, indigenous people in what is today the American Southwest had domesticated turkeys as well. Scholars once favored the theory that the Southwestern birds came from Mexico. Modern studies suggest instead that they were domesticated independently. Feathers and bones, not only meat, served practical and cultural purposes.

  The Spanish who wrote about those markets would soon carry the bird across the ocean.

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• 5. Across the Atlantic

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  Around 1519, turkeys were first exported to Europe through Spain, where the aristocratic classes took to them at once. Turkeys arrived in England in 1541. During the 17th century, English settlers brought turkeys across the ocean to North America.

  Lady Dorothy Nevill, who lived from 1826 to 1913, wrote in her memoirs about her great-grandfather Horatio Walpole. He was the 1st Earl of Orford, and he lived from 1723 to 1809. Walpole imported a quantity of American turkeys and kept them in the woods around Wolterton Hall. In all probability, those birds became the founding flock of the popular Norfolk turkey breeds of today.

  Domestic turkeys today are selectively bred to grow larger than wild ones, because they are raised for meat. In the United States, turkey is central to modern Thanksgiving celebrations. It is also often served at similar holiday occasions, such as Christmas.

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• 6. The Snood

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  A relaxed male turkey carries a pale snood only 2-3 cm long. The snood is an erectile, fleshy protuberance on the forehead, and males of both species have a single one hanging from the base of the culmen. When the male begins strutting in courtship, blood engorges the snood. It turns redder and stretches several centimeters, dangling well below the beak. Depending on the bird's sex, health and mood, a snood can measure anywhere from 1 to 6 in. It is one of several caruncles, the small fleshy growths found on turkeys.

  Captive female wild turkeys prefer to mate with long-snooded males. When two males meet face to face, the one with the shorter snood defers. Scientists demonstrated both effects with live males and with controlled artificial models.

  Intestinal coccidia are harmful protozoan parasites, and data from free-living wild turkeys showed fewer infections in males with longer snoods. That suggests the long-snooded males preferred by females are resistant to infection. A separate study of 500 male turkeys recorded snood lengths and took blood samples to test immune function. It found a similar negative correlation. Researchers pointed to the presence of more red blood cells when the snood is not removed, which helps the immune system fight off invaders.

  On commercial farms, fighting turkeys often peck and pull at each other's snoods, causing damage and bleeding. That frequently triggers more pecking by other birds and sometimes ends in cannibalism. To prevent it, some farmers cut off the snood while the bird is a chick, a process known as de-snooding.

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• 7. Daily Habits

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  Sunrise and sunset are the hours when wild turkeys feed most, and they forage continuously the rest of the day. In spring and summer, they eat grains such as wheat and corn, along with grasshoppers, spiders, worms and lizards. In fall and winter, the diet shifts to smaller fruits and nuts, including grapes, blueberries, acorns and walnuts. Domesticated turkeys eat a commercially produced feed formulated to increase their size. Farmers also give them grains that wild turkeys eat, such as corn.

  Dusting, sunning and preening are the three grooming habits turkeys practice. In a dust bath, a turkey gets low on its stomach or side and flaps its wings, coating itself with dirt. This clears debris from the feathers and clogs the tiny pores where parasites such as lice can live. Sunning means bathing in sunlight on both the top and bottom halves of the body. It liquefies the oil the birds naturally produce, spreading it over the feathers, and it dries them after rain. Preening removes dirt and bacteria, and it also gets rid of feathers that are not durable.

  Domestic turkeys are considered flightless, but wild turkeys can and do fly for short distances. A quarter mile is how far a startled wild turkey can fly when it perceives danger. Walking and foraging suit the birds best, so flight is not their usual way to travel. Short flights up into a tree help them reach a roost.

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• 8. Gone and Back

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  An estimated 10 million wild turkeys lived in what is now the United States in the 17th century. By the 1930s, only 30,000 remained.

  In the 1960s and 1970s, biologists began trapping wild turkeys in the few places where they survived, including the Ozarks and New York. They released the birds into other states, among them Minnesota and Vermont.

  A pecking order governs wild turkey society, and habituated birds in residential areas may apply it to people and pets. They may try to dominate or attack humans they view as subordinates. In Brookline, Massachusetts, the 30,000 turkeys have become so prominent that the town treats them as an unofficial mascot. Some residents find them charming, while others have met aggression, particularly during mating season. Brookline even installed turkey statues around town as part of a public art project.

  In 2017, Brookline recommended steps that drew controversy, including "popping open an umbrella" and "forcefully fending them off with a broom". The advice was quickly rescinded. It was replaced with a caution that "being aggressive toward wild turkeys is not recommended by State wildlife officials".

  Starting in 2014, researchers surveyed wildlife biologists on the National Wild Turkey Federation Technical Committee across the U.S. states. As of 2019, the wild turkey population had declined by around 3% since 2014, and the number of hunters had fallen by 18%. Those figures are incomplete: the 2019 population data lacked information from 12 states, and the hunter data lacked eight.

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