A Wild Turkey strutting through a suburban cul-de-sac, tail fanned and wattles flushed red, is a strange sight to anyone who only knows the domesticated version on a dinner table. The wild bird is leaner, faster, and considerably more capable: strong enough on the wing to fly up into a tree every night to roost, safely out of reach of coyotes and foxes.
Turkeys becoming a suburban nuisance again is, underneath the eye-roll, a conservation success story. Overhunting and forest clearing had wiped Wild Turkeys out of huge swaths of their historic range by the early 1900s; state agencies spent decades live-trapping birds from surviving pockets and releasing them elsewhere, and by the 1990s the species had been restored to nearly every state it once occupied, plus a few it hadn't.
The gobble that opens spring mornings in turkey country carries astonishingly far through open woods (up to a kilometer under calm conditions) as displaying males compete to be heard by hens spread out across the landscape. It carries loud and unmistakable enough that you can name the bird before you ever see it.
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How to identify
- A huge, dark-bodied ground bird with an iridescent bronze-green sheen and a bare, wattled blue-and-red head.
- Males ('toms') fan a wide, banded tail and puff out their body feathers in a full strut display; females are smaller and duller.
- Travels in flocks, walking and scratching through leaf litter, but flies well and roosts high in trees at night.
- The gobble carries remarkably far through open woodland, especially at dawn in spring.
Voice
The classic gobble-gobble-gobble, given by displaying males and audible up to a kilometer away on a calm morning.
Lore
Benjamin Franklin's put-down of the Bald Eagle is real, but it usually gets quoted out of context. In a January 26, 1784 letter to his daughter Sarah Bache, he wasn't lobbying for a new national bird: he was needling the Society of the Cincinnati, a hereditary veterans' club whose new medal struck him as looking less like an eagle and more like a turkey. He ran with the comparison, calling the eagle 'a Bird of bad moral Character' that steals fish from the harder-working Fishing Hawk rather than catching its own, and 'a rank Coward' that the sparrow-sized kingbird can chase off its own territory.
Set beside that eagle, the turkey came out looking good by comparison. Franklin called it 'a much more respectable Bird' and 'a true original Native of America,' noting that eagles turn up on every continent while the turkey was unique to this one until Jesuits carried some to France. He added that the bird, 'though a little vain and silly,' was 'a Bird of Courage' that would happily go after a British grenadier who wandered into its farmyard in a red coat. None of this amounts to a national-bird proposal: the letter never makes one, and the popular claim that Franklin wanted the turkey on the Great Seal is a later exaggeration of what was, at heart, a joke about a club's medal.
At a glance
- Family
- Phasianidae (pheasants, grouse & turkeys)
- Range
- Throughout the U.S. and into southern Canada and Mexico
- Habitat
- Mixed woodland edges, fields, and increasingly suburban neighborhoods
- Diet
- Acorns, seeds, and fruit, plus insects, foraged by scratching through leaf litter
Where it lives
How big is it?
How is it doing?
Field notes
- Wild Turkeys were extirpated from huge parts of their historic range by the early 1900s through overhunting and habitat loss, then rebuilt through one of American wildlife management's biggest success stories: trap-and-transplant programs that restored populations to nearly every U.S. state by the 1990s.
- Despite their bulk, Wild Turkeys are strong fliers over short distances and roost in trees every night, out of reach of most ground predators.
- Benjamin Franklin's private complaints about the Bald Eagle's 'bad moral character' are often paired with a claim that he wanted the turkey as the national symbol instead — his actual letter never proposes that, though he does call the turkey 'a much more respectable bird.'
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