Texas turkeys in the wild
Wild turkeys are astute birds living peaceably within caring families as they stroll quietly on forest floors, ever watchful over each other.
The gangly male birds stand about 4 feet tall and weigh more than 20 pounds. Hens stand about half as tall and weigh about 12 pounds. Both sexes can outrun predators at speeds reaching 25 mph or fly off at speeds of 55 mph.
They scan daytime feeding grounds with vision three times the power of human eyesight.
Acute vision lets them see the slightest of movements and the tiniest of details.
Acute hearing allows the birds to detect the sound of rustling leaves in the distance. Males can hear the gobbling calls of other males a mile away. The Pilgrim colony at Plymouth, Mass., may not have had the skills to hunt wild turkeys for their Thanksgiving feast. But the local Wampanoag Indians who brought food to the feast knew how to hunt the area and likely delivered the birds to the first Thanksgiving. Colony Gov. William Bradford did say the feast had a “great store of wild turkeys.”
But centuries before the Pilgrims at Plymouth, Native Americans not only hunted wild turkeys but also domesticated them. The birds benefited Indian villages by devouring pesky crawling insects, and the tribes readily feasted on some of the birds during the autumn harvest.
Spanish explorers to the New World during the 16th century loaded their ships with domesticated wild turkeys from the Aztec Indians and delivered the birds to the Old World. European poultry farmers began a decadeslong process of breeding
barnyard turkeys into fully domesticated birds with fat breasts and white feathers.
Turkey farmers in the United States continued the breeding process, which has led to big fat roasted turkeys on Thanksgiving dinner tables.
But during the 19th century, North American wild turkey populations were being wiped out — eventually extirpated from the land of the Pilgrims and many other states. Rapacious hunting and the depletion of hardwood forests for urban expansion caused the wild tur
key population to plummet from more than 10 million birds to roughly 1 million during the early 20th century.
Yet turkey hunters, along with conservation groups and government agencies, have saved the wild turkey population. Their work in restoring hardwood forests and reintroducing wild turkeys in places including East Texas has led to a current population of about 6.7 million birds roaming American forests.