The biggest bird in North America makes a big comeback

By BILL CHAISSON
Of a Feather
There were no wild turkeys in the Northeast when I was a kid. By the 1940s a combination of over hunting and habitat elimination and reduced them to isolated populations from rural Pennsylvania to Arizona. They had disappeared from New Hampshire 150 years ago. Reintroduction efforts began in New York state in the 1950s and by 1957 there was a sustainable population in the southwest corner of the state. Birds also began migrating northward out of Pennsylvania into New York, reestablishing populations across the Southern Tier.

Birds from these populations were brought to Massachusetts in the 1970s. The initial group of 37 New York birds brought to the Berkshires grew to a population of about 1,000 by 1978. According to a 2012 article in New Hampshire magazine, written by Barbara Coles, reintroduction in New Hampshire began around the same time. Like Massachusetts, New Hampshire brought in birds from New York and also from Pennsylvania and let them loose in the Connecticut Valley. That part of the state had more dairy farms and less forest. Turkeys like a mosaic of forest and clearings.

By 1985 New Hampshire had a hunting season for turkeys and today the population is estimated to be 40,000 birds. How do they arrive at that estimate? In this state the Fish & Game does it with the help of the general public. Between Jan. 1 and March 31 of every year, the state agency asks anyone who sees a flock of turkeys to count them, note the location and send the information to them. You can do this online at www.wildlife.state.nh.us/surveys/turkey.html. You may submit data for up to three different flocks at the same time, but they ask you to not submit counts for the same flock more than once.

Turkeys are pretty easy to spot. They like feeding in open fields and they are the largest bird in North America in terms of their raw bulk. An adult male can weigh up to 24 pounds and be 49 inches long. An enormously tall bird like the whooping crane, which can be nearly 7 feet tall, only weighs 14 to 16 pounds. Even the California condor, which has a wingspan of 11 feet, only ranges up to about 20 pounds.

There isn’t anything that really looks like a turkey either. The turkey vulture, for obvious reasons, comes the closest to looking like a turkey, but is a much smaller and blacker bird. Domestic turkeys that escape can perhaps be confused with the wild variety, especially if they are so-called heritage breeds. Your basic butterball turkey is barely mobile, but several of the heritage breeds do resemble the wild birds somewhat. The Standard Bronze breed is probably the most similar. Like the wild birds there is a coppery sheen to the feathers and the overall color is brown. However, while the tips of the tail feathers are a bright chestnut brown in wild turkeys, those of the Standard Bronze are tipped in white.

Although turkeys were widespread in New England during the colonial and early Republic eras, there is no record — written or archaeological — that they were found on the offshore islands, like Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. During the period of reintroductions in Massachusetts, the state decided to have a policy of only bringing the birds back to areas where they were known to have lived historically. In a move that would make New Hampshire residents chuckle, some Vineyarders said “screw the state and their rules” and introduced their own birds to the island. However, they brought over a mixed flock of wild and heritage birds and now the Vineyard birds are first of all, completely tame and boring to hunt, and second, the strangest turkeys you’ve ever seen.

Turkeys can only fly a mile or so at a go (which is why they are absent from offshore islands) and so they do not migrate. Historically they were present essentially everywhere from southern Canada to Mexico. There is one other species of turkey. Domestic turkeys are derived from a southern Mexican subspecies of the widely distributed bird, but the ocellated turkey is a smaller, more garishly colored species found from the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico down into Guatemala and Belize.

In case you have ever wondered why there is both a bird and a country called turkey, that comes from a case of mistaken identity. Guinea fowls are native to northern Africa, but were domesticated throughout the Middle East. According to Vox.com, in the 15th century (before Columbus “discovered” the New World) the Mamluk Sultanate started exporting Guinea fowl to Europe, where they became a “thing” among the aristocracy, in the way that some still treat peacocks. The Mamluks were ethnically Turkish, so the birds were known as “Turkish chickens”. By Shakespeare’s time the English called both Guinea fowl and the American birds, “turkey cocks.” Indeed, they are referred to in the Bard’s “Henry IV: Part 1.” In Henry IV’s time they would only have known about Guinea fowl, however.

When you look out the window at the turkeys eating underneath your bird feeder, you are going to wonder how anyone could confuse those enormous birds with a tiny Guinea fowl. Well, think about how little alike an American and a European robin look, and you’ll start to understand that during the colonial period natural history was not exactly a high priority.