365 Urban Species. #096: Wild Turkey

Urban species #096: Wild turkey Meleagris gallopavo

If I were to expound upon the remarkable recovery of North America's greatest bird, you could be excused for thinking I was talking about the bald eagle or the California condor. North America's greatest bird, in terms of sheer mass, is the wild turkey, a species that was extirpated from many areas, including the state of Massachusetts, by the middle of the nineteenth century. Similar forces to those that turned mountain lions, wolves, and passenger pigeons into distant memories for Bay Staters, had wiped away Ben Franklin's favorite bird. But people who loved turkeys--both as a striking part of the native fauna and as a traditional hunting target and main course--arranged to import turkeys from Vermont (the only U.S. state without a city, and the last refuge of the mountain lion in the northeast). Stricter controls of hunting, and the spread of suburbia, where hunting is prohibited, have led to the turkey becoming a conspicuous part of the landscape once again.

In fact, with so much of the state having been turned into virtual forest edges, wild turkeys, like white-tailed deer, may be more prevalent around Boston today than they have been in 400 years. Stories about run-ins with turkeys are a staple of the suburban papers, with angry toms frequently sparring with their own reflection on cars and other shiny surfaces. Standing around three feet tall and weighing close to twenty pounds (double the weight of a large eagle) it's easy to see why they turn heads. Their ground-dwelling habits and large average brood size means that a turkey encounter is often a parade of a dozen or more huge glossy characters.

As they increase in the city, their main obstacle will be the limits of human tolerance. Cars will kill some, coyotes, foxes, and dogs will catch some young poults. They will eat spilled bird seed at feeders, and a few urban areas will have sufficient acorns and beech nuts to support a number of turkeys. But will people appreciate seeing wild turkeys, or like coyotes and deer, will they be seen as a problem to be managed?

( two pictures of cryptozoological quality )