Wild turkey

• 1. Introduction

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  The wild turkey, Meleagris gallopavo, is the heaviest member of the order Galliformes, the group of ground-dwelling game birds that includes pheasants and grouse. By the late 1930s, game managers believed that fewer than 30,000 of these birds were left in the entire United States. Today, estimates put the total at about 7 million. That is a recovery measured in hundreds of times over, and it happened to a bird that evolution seemed to have built for trouble. It is huge, it nests on the ground, and it cannot see well in the dark. How does a bird with so many weaknesses survive in forests full of foxes, owls and alligators? Why did the first attempts to rescue it fail so badly? And how did a bird that Europeans met in the woods of Massachusetts turn out to be a relative of the farmyard turkey they had already brought across the Atlantic? The answers begin with the animal itself.

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• 2. Built Like a Beacon

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  An adult male wild turkey, called a tom or gobbler, usually weighs between 5 and 11 kilograms and stretches 100 to 125 centimeters from bill to tail. Hens are far smaller, at 2.5 to 5.4 kilograms. Two large studies found average weights of 7.6 kilograms for males and 4.26 for females. The National Wild Turkey Federation lists its record tom at 16.85 kilograms, and toms above 13.8 kilograms are uncommon but not rare.

  The wings span only 1.25 to 1.44 meters, which is modest for such a heavy body. The legs are another story. The tarsus, the long lower leg bone, runs from 9.7 to 19.1 centimeters, and each male carries a spur behind the leg for sparring with rivals.

  A mature male's bare, reddish head is covered in fleshy growths called caruncles, which may help tell one bird from another. When a tom is excited, blood flows to the head. The snood, a flap on the bill, swells, and the wattles and bare skin of the head and neck flush red. Males have feathers with iridescent patches of red, purple, green, copper, bronze and gold, and a whole bird carries roughly 5,000 to 6,000 feathers. Parasites can dull the coloring of either sex, so a brilliant male may be advertising his health. Hens, by contrast, wear duller browns and grays.

  Most males also sport a beard, a tuft of coarse, hair-like filaments sprouting from the center of the chest. A one-year-old male's beard can already reach 5 inches, and about 10 percent of females grow a shorter, thinner one. Young males, known as jakes, are easy to spot because their beards are very short and the central feathers of their tail fans run longer than the rest. The preen gland of the turkey also hosts a bacterium, Corynebacterium uropygiale, whose function remains unknown.

  Size raises a ranking question. Only the trumpeter swan has a higher maximum average weight among North American birds, though several others, such as the American white pelican and the California condor, beat the turkey on mean mass.

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• 3. Life in the Woods

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  Hardwood forests broken up by pastures, fields and orchards suit the wild turkey best. In the Northeast, the birds thrive where oak and hickory dominate, along with red oak, beech, cherry and white ash. Around Lykes Fisheating Creek in south Florida, the ground cover includes up to 51 percent cypress, 12 percent hardwood hammocks and 17 percent glades of short grass. Slash pine plantations now cover much of the old longleaf pine flatwoods there.

  In California, acorns and wild oats lure turkeys into open oak woodland. In San Diego County they sit at least 30 to 50 miles inland. The Cleveland National Forest there borders high desert, and the birds shelter in dense manzanita thickets on dry hillsides.

  Despite their weight, wild turkeys are agile and fast in the air, unlike their domestic cousins. They rarely fly more than 400 meters, a quarter of a mile, and they usually stay low beneath the treetops. Their eyesight is very good by day and poor at night, so at twilight they climb into trees to roost in numbers. The species does not migrate. In snowy regions such as the Rockies and much of Canada, a turkey must therefore learn to pick large conifers that can shelter it from blizzards.

  The menu is broad. Acorns, hazel nuts, chestnuts, hickory nuts and pinyon pine seeds are favorites, along with berries, buds, roots, ferns and insects. Turkeys also take salamanders, lizards and small snakes. They feed in cow pastures, at backyard bird feeders and across croplands after harvest. Early morning and late afternoon are the favored feeding hours.

  Sometimes turkeys forage alongside deer and squirrels. The deer contribute their sense of smell, the turkey its sharp eyes, and the squirrels an extra lookout from above.

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• 4. Gobbles and Partnerships

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  A turkey's gobble can carry up to a mile. In early spring, males older than a year gobble to announce themselves to hens and rivals, and younger males sometimes join in. Pressure, rain and temperature are the three weather factors that can quiet the calling. The repertoire is much larger than the gobble alone, with named calls such as the plain yelp, the purr, the cluck, the cutt, the kee kee run and the putt.

  Males add two sounds made with the air sac in the chest. One is a low "drumming" like the booming of a prairie chicken. The other, the "spit", is a sharp burst of air.

  Courtship starts in March and April, while turkeys are still bunched in their winter flocks. A male struts by puffing out his feathers, fanning his tail and dragging his wings. His head and neck show red, white and blue, and a solid white head signals the highest excitement. Males are polygamous and mate with as many hens as they can.

  One study found something unexpected about males who court in pairs. The dominant partner fathered six more eggs, on average, than males who courted alone. Genetic analysis showed that the pairs are close relatives who share half their genetic material. The leading explanation is that the lesser partner passes on shared genes more often by helping a relative than by trying alone.

  After mating, each hen hunts for a site and scrapes a shallow depression in the dirt, hidden by woody vegetation. She lays 10 to 14 eggs, usually one a day, and incubates them for at least 28 days. The poults leave the nest within 12 to 24 hours of hatching. Ground nesting leaves the eggs exposed, and reproductively active birds suffer lower annual survival because of nest predation.

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• 5. Everyone's Dinner

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  Raccoons, Virginia opossums, striped skunks, red foxes and groundhogs all raid nests for eggs and young. Snakes join the list when poults are involved, including gopher snakes and pinesnakes. From above come bald eagles, barred owls and several hawks, among them red-tailed and Cooper's hawks.

  Poult mortality is highest in the first 14 days, especially for chicks roosting on the ground. It drops sharply after about half a year, once the birds near adult size. Hens and nearly full-grown young face further threats from great horned owls, goshawks, domestic dogs and cats. Coyotes, gray wolves, bobcats, cougars, Canada lynx and golden eagles hunt birds of every age. In the Southeast, the American alligator takes turkeys of any age that wander too close to water. Humans are now the leading predator of adult turkeys.

  Most turkeys run rather than fly when danger approaches, though they can manage short flights. When surprised with no chance to flee, poults hide beneath the body and wings of the hen while she sits still.

  Cornered adults fight back. They kick with their spurs, bite and ram with their bodies, and big toms can be fiercely aggressive. Hens have been seen chasing off at least two species of hawk in flight when their poults are threatened.

  People are not usually targets, but a startled or cornered turkey may attack. Birds used to seeing visitors in parks or campgrounds can grow tame enough to eat from a hand. Some toms attack parked cars and other reflective surfaces, apparently mistaking their reflection for a rival.

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• 6. Six Subspecies

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  The eastern wild turkey, Meleagris gallopavo silvestris, was the bird that Puritans, Jamestown's founders, Dutch New Yorkers and Acadians met in the woods. It ranges from Maine to northern Florida and as far west as Minnesota, Illinois and Missouri, with 5.1 to 5.3 million birds. Males can reach 30 pounds, and this is the most hunted subspecies.

  The Osceola, or Florida, turkey is named for the Seminole leader Osceola. It was first described in 1890 and numbers 80,000 to 100,000, mostly on the Florida peninsula. It is smaller and darker than the eastern bird, with iridescent green-purple body feathers and little white barring on the wings.

  The Rio Grande turkey, described in 1879, has long legs suited to prairie country. It ranges from Texas north to Kansas and Colorado and numbers around 1,000,000. Merriam's turkey was named in 1900 for Clinton Hart Merriam, the first chief of the U.S. Biological Survey. It lives in ponderosa pine country in the Rocky Mountains and has white-tipped tail feathers. Initial releases in Oregon in 1961 established a remnant population on the east slope of Mt. Hood.

  Gould's turkey is the largest of the six, with longer legs, larger feet and longer tail feathers. Heavily protected because of its skittish nature and threatened status, it lives mostly in northwestern Mexico, with a small population in southern Arizona.

  The sixth, the south Mexican wild turkey, is the nominate subspecies and the only one not found in the United States or Canada. Archaeologists have identified turkey bones in central Mexico from 800-100 BC, though it is unclear whether those birds were wild or domestic. Turkey remains from El Mirador in Guatemala, dated to the Late Preclassic, are the earliest evidence of the bird reaching the ancient Maya world. From this subspecies came the domestic turkey, which the Spaniards carried to Europe in the mid-16th century.

  From Spain the tame bird spread to France and then Britain, usually serving as a feast centerpiece for the wealthy. By 1620 it was common enough that Pilgrim settlers in Massachusetts brought turkeys with them from England. They did not know that a larger relative already lived in the forests there. The south Mexican subspecies, known in Spanish by its Aztec-derived name guajolote, is thought to be critically endangered as of 2010.

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• 7. The Great Comeback

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  By the 1940s, wild turkeys were almost entirely gone from Canada. In the United States they survived in scattered pockets, and in the northeast they were confined to the Appalachians, reaching north only to central Pennsylvania. Market hunting and habitat loss had been grinding the populations down for two centuries.

  The first rescue attempts used hand-reared birds, and they failed miserably. The captive-bred turkeys could not survive in the wild, and many had imprinted too strongly on humans.

  A better method protected the surviving wild flocks and let them breed. Officials then waited for numbers to rise, caught the surplus with a projectile net, and moved the birds to empty territory before repeating the cycle. Some releases went into western states where the bird was never native. Farmland helps, since it supplies grain, and berry shrubs grow at field edges.

  Hunting has become legal in 49 states, all but Alaska. The U.S. population was estimated at 1.3 million in 1973. Since the 1980s, similar trap-and-transfer projects have brought turkeys back to several Canadian provinces, sometimes using birds from across the border. By 2018 they had multiplied faster than Canadian scientists expected, flourishing even far north of the predicted range.

  Outside North America the story is mixed. Attempts to establish the wild turkey in Britain as a game bird in the 18th century did not work. George II is said to have kept a flock of a few thousand in Richmond Park near London, but poachers stole them easily and the clashes grew too dangerous for gamekeepers. Dogs were used to hunt the survivors, which were then shot out of the trees. Other British and Irish populations eventually died out, perhaps from poaching and a shortage of winter feed. Small groups in the Czech Republic and Germany have done better, and there are sizable wild populations in Hawaii and New Zealand.

  California has a stranger history. An extinct relative, Meleagris californica, lived there until about 10,000 years ago. The state's present turkeys descend from birds released in the 1960s and 1970s, and after 2000 they multiplied until they were an everyday sight in the East Bay by 2015.

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• 8. Names and Symbols

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  Carl Linnaeus formally described the wild turkey in 1758, in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae. He fixed the type locality as Mexico. Meleagris comes from the Ancient Greek word for guineafowl. The species name gallopavo is late Medieval Latin, joining the words for fowl and peacock, and the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner had used it by 1555 in his Historiae animalium.

  One of the best-known stories about the bird is probably false. It says Benjamin Franklin wanted the turkey as the national bird of the United States. The claim traces to a letter he wrote to his daughter Sarah Bache on the 26th of January 1784. The letter mainly criticized the Society of the Cincinnati, which he compared to a chivalric order that clashed with republican ideals. Franklin noted that the bald eagle on the Society's crest looked rather like a turkey. He wished the eagle had not been chosen to represent the country, calling it "a Bird of bad moral Character" that steals fish from the osprey. Of the turkey, he wrote that it was "a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America." He added that it was a bit vain and silly but brave enough to take on "a Grenadier of the British Guards." Yet Franklin never publicly opposed the eagle or proposed the turkey as a national symbol, and the story has been called a myth.

  Native American peoples had far older relationships with the bird. Eastern tribes ate the eggs and meat, sometimes drying the meat into jerky to last through cold weather. They burned parts of forests to open meadows that drew turkeys and gave hunters a clear shot. Turkey feathers appear in rituals and headgear, and Catawba chiefs traditionally wore turkey feather headdresses. Muscogee Creek and Wampanoag leaders wore turkey feather cloaks.

  The turkey clan is one of three Lenape clans, and the movements of wild turkeys inspired the Caddo turkey dance. The Navajo call the bird Tązhii. In their folklore it brought corn and seeds from the Third Navajo World, and its feathers are used in many ceremonies.

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