Wild turkey

Name and taxonomy

Carl Linnaeus described the wild turkey in 1758, from a Mexican type locality. The genus name Meleagris is the Ancient Greek word for guineafowl. The species name gallopavo joins the Latin words for fowl and peacock. Conrad Gessner used that word in 1555. English shortened the older names turkey cock and turkey hen to one word. Those words first meant guineafowl, which reached Europe by way of Turkey.

Colonists moved the old name onto the similar American bird. French speakers called it poule d'inde, chicken of India, which became dinde. Speakers of Norwegian and Swedish used a name taken from Calicut in India. Six subspecies are recognised. They differ in size, in plumage tone and in the country they occupy.

Evolution and relatives

Two turkey species survive, this one and the ocellated turkey of Central America. A third species, the Californian turkey, died out about 10,000 years ago. Turkeys sit in the pheasant family, alongside grouse, partridges and junglefowl. Like other galliforms, the turkey has short rounded wings and a heavy body.

The eastern subspecies covers the whole eastern half of the United States. The Osceola turkey of Florida is the smallest, at 7 to 8 kilograms. Gould's turkey of Mexico is the largest, with longer legs and a longer tail. Merriam's turkey lives in ponderosa pine country in the Rocky Mountains. The Rio Grande bird has long legs suited to open prairie. The south Mexican subspecies is the ancestor of every farm turkey.

Appearance

A male normally weighs 5 to 11 kilograms and averages 7.6 kilograms. Females average 4.26 kilograms. The record male weighed 16.85 kilograms. The wingspan runs from 1.25 to 1.44 metres, which is short for the weight. The tail is long, at 24.5 to 50.5 centimetres.

Body feathers are blackish with a copper sheen that deepens in an old male. A mature male has a bare red head and neck with red wattles. Fleshy growths called caruncles cover the head, and their pattern differs between birds. A flap on the bill, the snood, swells when the bird is excited. The head and neck then flush red as blood flows into them. The male also shows red, purple, green, copper, bronze and gold in the plumage.

Most males grow a beard, a tuft of coarse filaments on the breast. The beard keeps growing, and a one year old male has one up to 13 centimetres long. About 10 per cent of females also grow a beard, thinner and shorter. Females wear duller brown and grey and have a feathered neck. Males carry a spur behind each lower leg and use it to fight. A turkey has roughly 5,000 to 6,000 feathers.

Habitat and range

Wild turkeys favour hardwood forest and mixed conifer forest with open patches. Pastures, fields, orchards and seasonal marshes provide those openings. Mature open forest with a mix of tree species suits them best. Oak and hickory woods hold the most birds in the north east. In Florida they use cypress and gum swamps and scrubby palmetto.

In California the birds gather where oaks drop acorns. They also use oak savanna, conifer foothills and dense manzanita thickets. The species reaches from southern Canada through the United States into northern Mexico. GBIF records the bird in 104 countries, and that count includes farm and escaped birds. Introduced populations live in Hawaii, New Zealand, Germany and the Czech Republic.

Turkeys do not migrate. In snowy country a flock must find large conifers to shelter in during a storm. Birds roost off the ground at dusk, because their night vision is poor. Attempts to establish the bird in Britain in the 18th century failed. Reports say George II kept a flock at Richmond Park, and poachers took the birds.

Diet and feeding

The wild turkey is omnivorous and takes most of its food from the ground. Acorns and other hard mast are the preferred food. Hazel, chestnut, hickory and pinyon pine all supply nuts. The bird also eats seeds, berries, buds, leaves, fern fronds, roots and grasses. Insects, salamanders, lizards and small snakes make up a small part of the diet.

Ground insects and salamanders account for about 10 per cent of what a turkey eats. Birds climb into shrubs and low trees to reach fruit and buds. Most feeding falls in the two to three hours after dawn and before dusk. Flocks work cow pastures and stubble fields after harvest. Some birds visit garden feeders. A broad diet lets large numbers of turkeys live in a small area.

Behaviour and social life

Turkeys are active by day and social through the year. In winter they form bands, and a rank order develops inside a band. In some places a band defends ground against other bands. The birds graze fields and woodland by day and fly up to roost at night. Eyesight and hearing are sharp, and the birds are wary.

A wild turkey runs fast and flies fast, unlike a farm bird. Flights are low and short, usually no more than 400 metres. One bird was recorded flying at 88.5 kilometres per hour. A turkey that meets a predator will normally run rather than fly. Cornered adults kick with the spurs, bite and shove with the body.

Turkeys sometimes feed alongside deer and squirrels. Each animal watches for danger in a different way, so the group gains. The deer brings a good nose, the turkey brings good eyes. Male turkeys sometimes attack parked cars and other reflective surfaces. They probably take the reflection for a rival male.

Communication and senses

Biologists count at least 15 different turkey calls. The list includes the yelp, the purr, the cluck, the putt and the fly-down cackle. The gobble is the loudest and the best known. A male gobbles in early spring to advertise himself to hens and to rivals. The sound carries for more than 1.5 kilometres.

Males also make a low drumming sound with air in a sac in the chest. A sharp release of that air makes the noise hunters call the spit. Weather changes how much a male gobbles, above all pressure, rain and temperature. The bare head changes colour with the mood of the bird. A head that turns solid white marks the highest excitement.

Reproduction and life cycle

Males are polygynous and mate with as many hens as they can hold. Courtship starts in late January in the south and late February in the north. A displaying male puffs his feathers, fans the tail and drags the wings. That display is called strutting. Males often court in pairs, and the two birds are usually close relatives. A dominant male in such a pair fathered six more eggs than a male courting alone.

The hen scrapes a shallow hollow in the ground and hides it in thick cover. She lays 10 to 14 eggs, about one a day. Each egg is 4.9 to 6.9 centimetres long. She incubates alone for at least 28 days, and the male gives no care. Laying an egg in another hen's nest is common in this species.

Poults hatch covered in down and leave the nest within a day. They walk and feed themselves at once. The hen broods them at night for the first two weeks. She defends them, and hens have chased hawks away from a brood. Young males stay with her until autumn, and young females until the next spring.

Turkeys can breed at about 10 months old. A young male rarely wins a mate against older males in his first spring. Average life expectancy in the wild is 1.3 to 1.6 years. The oldest known wild bird reached 13 years. Half of a wild population may die in a single year.

Predators and threats

Ground nests make the turkey easy prey, so many animals take eggs. Ravens, crows, raccoons, opossums, skunks, foxes and groundhogs raid nests. Rat snakes, corn snakes and pine snakes take eggs and poults. Hawks, owls and bald eagles take small poults. Death is heaviest in the first 14 days of life.

Coyotes, bobcats, cougars, golden eagles and lynx kill birds of any age. Great horned owls, goshawks, dogs and cats take hens and large young. American alligators take turkeys of all ages near water in the south east. People are now the main predator of adult turkeys. A hen with poults sits tight while the chicks hide under her wings and body.

Turkeys carry at least 60 kinds of parasite. The list holds protozoans, flukes, tapeworms, roundworms and arthropods. Parasites dull the colour of the plumage in both sexes. Bright colour in a male probably signals good health.

Population and conservation

Market hunting and forest clearance cut the range hard over two centuries. By the late 1930s the United States held as few as 30,000 wild turkeys. The bird disappeared from 18 states and from almost all of Canada. New York and Vermont lost their birds in the 1850s. Early releases of hand reared birds failed, because those birds could not survive.

Managers then protected the wild birds that were left and let numbers grow. They caught surplus birds with a net fired over a flock and moved them elsewhere. That trap and transfer method repopulated state after state. The total stood at about 1.3 million birds in 1973. Current estimates place the population at about 7 million.

Hunting is now legal in 49 states. Transfers since the 1980s have put turkeys back into several Canadian provinces. The birds spread further north than Canadian scientists expected. iNaturalist holds 198,090 observations of the species. The south Mexican subspecies is thought to be in serious trouble.

Relationship with humans

People in Mexico domesticated the turkey long before Europeans arrived. Turkey bones appear at central Mexican sites dated between 800 and 100 BC. Spanish ships took the tame bird to Europe in the middle of the 16th century. From Spain it spread to France and then to Britain as a farmyard bird. By 1620 English settlers carried turkeys with them to Massachusetts. They did not know that a larger wild relative already lived in those woods.

The wild turkey is one of the most hunted game birds in the United States. Licences and fees fund state wildlife departments and habitat work. Turkeys near parks and campgrounds grow tame and will feed from a hand. A startled or cornered bird may turn on a person. Keeping a respectful distance avoids almost every incident.

In culture and myth

The turkey matters to many Native American peoples across its range. Eastern nations ate the eggs and the meat, and dried the meat for winter. They burned forest patches to make meadows that drew displaying birds. Catawba chiefs wore headdresses of turkey feathers. Muscogee Creek and Wampanoag people wore cloaks of turkey feathers.

One of the three Lenape clans takes the turkey as its name. The movements of wild turkeys shaped the turkey dance of the Caddo. In Navajo tradition the bird is called Tązhii and is a sacred bird. Navajo stories say the turkey carried corn and seed from the Third World. In Maya tradition nobles and priests held a special link with the ocellated turkey.

A popular story says Benjamin Franklin wanted the turkey as the national bird. He did praise the turkey in a letter to his daughter in 1784. He never proposed it in public, and historians call the story a myth. The domestic turkey is now the usual main dish at Thanksgiving. By 1857 it was already part of the standard New England dinner.