Wild Things: turkeys, turkeys everywhere

Female turkeys in the wild. Ed. Kanze photos

By ED KANZE

If you gobble down a meal of fowl late in the year, odds are the fowl you’ll be eating is a turkey. There was a time not so long ago when most of us had seen a turkey on a serving platter, but not one fanning its tail in a field or strutting through the woods. 

That was then. This is now. 

Turkeys, it seems, are everywhere. Are we happy about it? It depends on who you talk to.

Back in B.C. (before children, which in my case didn’t enter my life until I was 46), there were no wild turkeys in Westchester County. No one knows for sure when, but as European colonists moved onto the landscape and found turkey meat widely available, delectable, and easily obtained, the turkey vanished. It may well have been gone by the time George Washington and a group of threadbare soldiers spent a few nights digging trenches and avoiding engagement with the British army on Mount Misery, the hill I grew up on in North White Plains. Washington’s men would surely have rejoiced in a turkey dinner during those dark hungry nights. I doubt they had the opportunity.

What changed the picture were various piecemeal reintroductions of wild turkeys to the Northeast, beginning in the mid-20th century. One of them was conducted by my former employer, the Westchester County Department of Parks, Recreation, and Conservation. The commissioner in my day, Joe Caverly, fell into a rapture when I told them that for the first time in a couple of centuries, turkeys were raising young in the Ward Pound Ridge Reservation. The year, if I recall correctly, was 1985. Joe had played an important role in turkey reintroduction efforts in Westchester. He and the others who worked on the project had good grounds for happiness and a bit of pride, too.

While there’s no getting around the fact that a roast turkey looks pretty good on a serving dish, most readers will agree that a real, live, wild turkey offers a finer feast for the eye. The adult males are stunning with their iridescent blue heads, blazing crimson wattles, shimmering iridescent bodies tinged with green and bronze and ruby, and beards worthy of Darwin. A male in full display, tail fanned, wings drooping to reveal bold black-and-white bars, and head colors somehow juiced, offers one of the finest sights in nature. 

The svelte females and young are nothing less than handsome, too.

In a cynical moment, I can look at a wild turkey and see ugliness. There are the naked heads and necks, not unlike those of the turkey vulture, which wins no beauty contests. And there are those bizarre scaly appendages that jut out above the beaks and in front of the eyes. They look like giant warts and come very near spoiling the picture. Yet they don’t, at least in my eyes.

For a couple of years and maybe more, back before turkeys made their comeback as breeding birds in Westchester, there was a lone female that built nests at Muscoot Farm. She laid eggs, big dingy things that look like oversized chicken eggs, but the eggs failed to hatch. Local birdwatchers, hoping for offspring that always failed to burst out and be counted, pitied the bird. She had no male to mate with. They nicknamed her the Virgin Mary.

I’ve never forgotten the first time I heard a Pound Ridge Reservation tom strutting for females. It was a cold clear morning. A loud, bizarre sound traveled over the fields and landed in my ears. What on Earth? Then it hit me. The bird was uttering a sound I’d never before heard, yet at the same time I’d known since I was a kid in kindergarten. Gobble-gobble-gobble.