Seen so often on our urban streets, wild turkeys also made TV dinners proliferate in our freezers

We have turkeys to thank for TV dinners. In 1953, C.A. Swanson and Sons greatly overestimated how many turkeys the company would sell for the Thanksgiving holiday. After the big feast day, the company still had 260 tons of chilled turkeys in 10 refrigerated boxcars. Because the refrigeration worked only while the boxcars were moving, the trains ran back and forth between Nebraska and the East Coast until the company figured out what to do with all their birds.

A Swanson sales rep proposed processing the turkeys along with cornbread stuffing and sweet potatoes into individual frozen meals, Smithsonian magazine says. Executives liked this idea but changed the components a little. The first frozen turkey meal consisted of the familiar trio: turkey, mashed potatoes and peas. Each meal rested on a foil tray that could be heated in the oven whenever a diner had a hankering for a meal. At the time, televisions were new and trendy, so Swanson called the frozen meals TV dinners. These were a huge success, and in 1954, Swanson sold 10 million frozen meals. Soon it seemed everyone was eating them, including celebrities. In 1962, Barbra Streisand said, “The best fried chicken I know comes with a TV dinner.” 

It took more than a sales rep to develop the dinners. The way was prepared by Clarence Birdseye, who in 1910 had to quit Amherst college because his family ran out of money. Working in northern Canada in 1912, he watched as the Inuit preserved fish at minus 30 degrees by throwing them on ice. According to a company history, Birdseye noticed that ice crystals did not ruin the texture, flavor or color of these quickly frozen fish.

Birdseye used this knowledge to patent a Quick Freeze machine in 1925. He packed fish, meat or vegetables into waxed-cardboard cartons – made in Somerville – that were flash-frozen under high pressure. Birdseye began selling frozen meals to airlines in 1945, though it wasn’t until Swanson came along with its boxcars full of chilled turkeys that frozen meals expanded to our supermarket shelves.

Wild turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo) roamed North America 10 million years ago. We are familiar with two subspecies of this ancient bird. The first, the Eastern wild turkey (Meleagris gallopavo silvestris), is the wild bird we see roaming our city and suburban streets. The second, the Mexican turkey (Meleagris gallopavo gallopavo), is the grandparent of the domestic turkey we eat on Thanksgiving. The Aztecs and Maya domesticated the Mexican turkey thousands of years ago, and Spanish colonizers encountered the domesticated turkey in the 1500s. They carried these birds back to Spain, where they became popular throughout Europe. In the 1600s and 1700s, European settlers carried domesticated Mexican turkeys back to Massachusetts and Virginia, where farmers raised the birds. Today farmed turkeys thrive alongside the native wild turkeys we encounter on our streets and in our yards.

When settlers landed in North America in the 1600s and 1700s, wild turkeys were abundant. But like many other birds and mammals, they were hunted so relentlessly that they became scarce by the 1800s. According to William Peabody in A Report on the Birds of Massachusetts to the Legislature in 1840, 

The Wild Turkey … is so uncommon in Massachusetts that it does not seem necessary to describe it at large; in a few years it will doubtless leave us forever.

John James Audubon, too, wrote of the wild turkey, 

About the beginning of October, when scarcely any of the seeds and fruits have yet fallen from the trees, these birds assemble in flocks … The males, or, as they are more commonly called, the gobblers, associate in parties of from ten to a hundred, and search for food apart from the females; while the latter are seen advancing with its brood of young, then about two-thirds grown, all intent on shunning the old cocks, which, even when the young birds have attained this size, will fight with, and often destroy them by repeated blows on the head.

When the Turkeys arrive in parts where the mast [nuts, seeds and fruits of woody plants] is abundant, they devour all before them. This happens about the middle of November. In this way, roaming about the forests, and feeding chiefly on mast, they pass the autumn and part of the winter.

As spring approaches, male turkeys mate with as many females as possible. They strut in front of the females, puff up their feathers and display their tail. They even change the color of their head from red to blue to white as they get excited. They gobble, spit and drum to exert their dominance over other males.

In March or April, the female makes a nest – a shallow depression in the ground – where she lays up to 14 eggs, one per day. Then she keeps the eggs warm for almost a month. Because females nest on the ground where they are easy targets, predators take many wild turkeys or their eggs. 

When the chicks hatch, they leave the nest within a day. Within two weeks they can fly to tree branches, where the mother warms them at night under her wings.

Turkeys are members of the grouse family, and the second-largest bird in North America. (The largest is the trumpeter swan.) Male turkeys have a fleshy wattle that hangs from the top of their beak. Female turkeys are about half the size of males.

Some wild turkeys have adapted to our urban habitats. Cities provide a mix of shelter and open areas for feeding. There is food too (nuts, seeds, berries), and few predators. Therefore, you never know when you might encounter one of these adaptable birds as you walk or drive through your neighborhood.

Reader photo

A white-tailed deer seen by North Pond at the Fresh Pond Reservation in Cambridge on Sept. 10, 2021.

Have you taken photos of our urban wild things? Send your images to Cambridge Day and we may use them as part of a future feature. Include the photographer’s name and the general location where the photo was taken.

Jeanine Farley is an educational writer who has lived in the Boston area for more than 30 years. She enjoys taking photos of our urban wild things.

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