Wild Life / wild turkey
Wild turkeys are here and there and everywhere
Hi, friends — I decided to try a weekly newsletter and this is the first installment. Please let me know what you think. I’ll send an animal drawing, plus a small story and some interesting facts every Friday. It’s totally fine if you’d rather not join me on this adventure (unsubscribe below, no worries!).
First up is the wild turkey (Meleagris gallopavo). Please reply with your own wild turkey encounters; I’m collecting all the small stories. Thanks! Amy Jean
I’ve seen them at dusk, dark blobs roosting in tree branches (most often in the woods, but, once, remarkably, overhanging a city street). I’ve seen them in low, focused flight, an unexpected flurry of thousands (literally thousands!) of brown feathers. I’ve seen twenty of them sauntering up our driveway like a parade. I’ve seen a hen and her poults lounging under the rhododendron, surprised by our sudden return after a fortnight away.
I’ve found one of their surprisingly small, buff-brown, speckled eggs, sadly cracked on a stone. I’ve heard their squeaky strange yelps and gobbles. I’ve watched males (or “toms”) fanning out their beautiful tail feathers, gracefully hovering around females. For such awkward looking creatures, they honestly appear to be floating—with comedic, balletic ease.
I didn’t grow up in Connecticut, and, as a kid, wild turkeys existed for me only in the mythology of Thanksgiving, taught in the public schools I attended in Oklahoma and Arizona. Some part of me didn’t think that wild turkeys were real, or part of any contemporary landscape. But here, in Connecticut, wild turkeys abound.
I encounter them on a daily basis, possibly more than I see friends or neighbors. They cross the roads and pick their way through the underbrush in small flocks. Wild turkeys give the impression of old souls, visitors from another time and place. When I watch their movements and focus on their insane featherless faces (which change color with emotional stress), I feel one step closer to understanding dinosaurs.
Though you may think of them as the silhouette of your hand in construction paper (whoever made that abstract leap is a genius), wild turkeys are fascinating and complex creatures. They are surprisingly agile fliers (up to 50 mph) and can maneuver into trees for their evening roost. Imagine this: wild turkeys can swim.
They are great foragers and fairly omnivorous, which is part of their success in small ranges—they like acorns, seeds, berries, insects, and occasionally small toads or snakes. They will visit your backyard feeder at dinnertime, too (though this shouldn’t be encouraged). Hens and poults band together in large groups for winter. The twenty birds that walked up our driveway were surprising, but nowhere near the potentially hundreds that might flock together.
The wild turkey is a native species of North America and has a long history with humans here. They were an important food source for indigenous peoples in the Northeast, who managed woodland habitats for effective hunting and preservation, and also used turkey bones and feathers for tools and adornment.
Subspecies of wild turkeys ranged across the continent and were domesticated at least twice: thousands of years ago by the Aztecs in what is now Mexico, and separately by the Anasazi (in what is now the southwestern US). The significance of wild turkeys is vast and varied across numerous indigenous cultures.
For all of its Thanksgiving lore, the wild turkey was not the centerpiece of the first Thanksgiving meal in 1621. It did, however, help feed the appetites of colonial expansion, as millions of European settlers arrived throughout the eighteenth century. By the early twentieth century, overhunting and habitat destruction had decimated their numbers—from around ten million to tens of thousands.
Efforts beginning in the 1970s to reintroduce and restore the birds were eventually successful, and they rebounded in many areas, including the Northeast (though their situation isn’t steadfast, and numbers have recently declined). Wild turkeys are, in fact, creatures from another time and place—incredibly remaking a home for themselves, picking their way through the underbrush, in between and alongside us.
Thanks to —
This newsletter is inspired by Edith Zimmerman’s Drawing Links. You should check it out and subscribe and you will feel better about the world.
Turkey links —
The flap over a turkey’s beak is called a “snood.” Here’s an incredible close-up of a turkey’s face and account of the Aztec domestication of wild turkeys.
This bonkers video by PBS about aggressive turkeys is pretty good.
Watching/listening to the sound waves of turkey gobbles is mesmerizing.
Also —
My wild turkey drawing is for sale; please reply if you’re interested.
Next week: the naturally shy and very smart American black bear.
Please forward this newsletter to friends who would enjoy—thank you!
From Jess H., writing about wild turkeys in the Adirondacks:
Spring of my junior year of high school, I finally had both my driver's license and clearance from my parents to take the family car to points more distant than the mall closest to our suburban, upstate New York home. Forthwith, my best friend and I decided to go for a hike in the southern Adirondacks one weekend day. We identified a hike, drove to the trailhead, and set off. It was still early spring in the Adirondacks; it was sunny but cold, and the trees were naked. My friend and I were the only people on that trail right then. When we were about a mile in, we pissed off a wild turkey who, perhaps trusting more in its fight than its flight, charged us. I'm not proud to admit this, but we turned around and ran; we ran all the way back to the car, in fact, and drove to a diner.
Ok, full disclosure: I'm not entirely certain it was a wild turkey. We were, after all, facing the other direction (and running). But it WAS a dark, avian, flapping blob and if I had to describe the sound it was making I might well have said "like a gobble." Almost certainly a wild turkey.
From Sasha W. in Boston, MA:
At the beginning of the pandemic, way back in April, I went for a walk along the Riverway with my then-5-year-old son. When we returned to our car, parked in front of church on a side street, I found I'd locked my keys in. Someone walking by was kind enough to call AAA on their phone for me, and my son and I settled in to wait for the technician. We watched a wild turkey emerge from the church yard and cross the street, and as it wandered away from us, along the sidewalk, my son said, "Mommy, there are thirteen of them." I looked around and saw just two more. "Over there," he said, gesturing to the shadowed church wall. He was right, there were thirteen, and soon even more emerged. We counted them, amazed: "Fourteen! Sixteen!" They all came walking out of the yard toward the street where we stood and some approached us, picking up speed and following as we backed away from them. We were freaked out! Drawing on maternal instinct, I lunged toward them, and they ran the other way. We learned that when we moved away, they followed, but when we moved toward them, they ran, so we played this game with them for a while.
Eventually the turkeys wandered down the block, and we watched as they approached other passersby, and even an idling car, scattering people in opposite directions and preventing someone from getting out of the car. "Chase them," we called out, "They'll run away if you chase them!" One or two people tried it, but most were chased away themselves. Wild turkeys are aggressive, we concluded, but easily cowed, too. Finally, AAA came, our keys were retrieved, and we left the sixteen wild turkeys to pursue their adventures without us.