I’m talking over Zoom with Dave Scarpitti, a wildlife biologist who serves as point person for dealing with wild turkeys at the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife. And I’ve managed to ask him a question he’s clearly uncomfortable with. “No, no,” he says, a furrow crossing his brow. “I definitely don’t think turkeys are Yankees fans.”
I’ve asked because he’s just shared how in Massachusetts, the last of the native birds was killed on Mount Tom in 1851. They’d roamed the region for millions of years – then suddenly, there were none. A century passed. And then, in 1973, 37 birds were relocated here – from New York state.
Thus my question. And thus a special burden on us, morally – as a state and region that killed off the bird Ben Franklin once speculated would be a fit symbol for America – to figure out how to live together long term.
Those 37 New York birds prospered. Within 10 years, they’d reinhabited all of Berkshire County. By the time I moved to Massachusetts in the early 2000s, there were 30,000 or more. I vividly remember my first encounter. My two young sons and I were playing Wiffle ball on one of the green spaces on the campus of the Harvard Business School when suddenly we heard someone shrieking. In awe, we watched a wild turkey chase a student past us.
The thing is, wild turkeys don’t seem a natural fit for urban and suburban areas. With some weighing upward of 20 pounds and standing more than 4 feet tall, they’re huge – and with their metallic feathers and vivid wattles, their bladelike legs and dark stares, they convey a dinosaur presence.
And yet: the turkeys have discovered that urban and suburban areas offer awesome food resources – think of the bird feeders alone! – and fewer predators. They’ve moved in and raised generations of poults among us. They can inspire awe and affection, but living side by side with the birds hasn’t come without strains.
“If I had a nickel for every complaint that comes my way about turkeys,” Scarpitti says.
The roots of the problems lie in society. Ours and the turkeys’. Take turkeys first: They live in flocks (well, rafters) where survival means taking seriously matters of hierarchy and dominance, sustenance and season. In spring, the toms compete for mates; in fall, the jakes – the young males – jockey for position. Turkeys can’t go many days without eating, so they settle near food sources.
Now take us. Some among us will feed the birds. Others will own dark, shiny cars. Among the turkeys that settle near the food source, and near the cars, a tom will see his own reflection walk by. He’ll challenge it – and see it challenge him right back. The car will suffer badly for its mirrored surface. “You can save thousands of dollars in damage with a simple car cover,” Scarpitti points out.
You can also – and I see him nearly ready to tear his dark hair out as he says this – stop feeding turkeys, advertently or inadvertently, for your neighbors’ sake. Then there’s the matter of us encountering the turkeys. If we’re busy, and not used to wild animals, we’ll back down and move away when jakes challenge us for dominance. They’ll think: aha, I’ve won the encounter and be readier to harass the next people they meet. If, collectively, we calmly and confidently face them, showing we won’t let them dominate or get behind us to chase, they’ll learn not to challenge.
Yes, it’s playing chicken with birds that are much larger than chickens. But they’re not predators; they’re players in a pecking order. Scarpitti’s office does its best to protect us and the turkeys, by educating us with public-facing information and, as a last resort, intervening when things really break down.
But we should relate to turkeys more with wonder than worry. A glance back at history shows an incredible depth and complexity to how we’ve lived together.
Take Thanksgiving, for starters, and the semimythical feast we learn about as children, in which the Pilgrims, half-dead with the cold and hunger of their transition to the New World, express gratitude to Chief Massasoit and the Wampanoag. We know, to the extent that there ever was such a meal, which group brought the turkeys to the party, right?
It’s a trick question: There were no turkeys at that feast, as far as anyone can tell. But if there were, they might well have been from the colonists.
It’s true. History clearly shows them on the manifests of early ships: The English brought turkeys to the New World. Why wouldn’t they? For at least 80 years, as long as anyone alive could remember, they’d been a mainstay of the British farm, for their size, their hardiness in cold weather …
According to food historian Andrew Smith, by the 1560s there were already laws being passed in England against farmers letting their turkeys run loose on city streets. By 1594, the modern factory farm was evolving: An agricultural expert advised turkey farmers to keep the hens in coops that were “so straight and narrow” that they wouldn’t be able to turn their bodies and so would grow fat. Turkeys earned their first mention in Shakespeare in 1601, in “Twelfth Night.” Why wouldn’t the English want to bring the turkey to the New World?
Well, okay, yes – they were already here, roughly 11 million of them. But how were the English to know that, when they first encountered the birds via merchants trading out of what was then called Constantinople in the Ottoman Empire – today’s, you guessed it, Turkey. That’s one story of how the birds got their name in English.
Turkeys reached the Ottoman Empire via the Spanish, with Hernando Cortes and other explorers picking them up from Mexico by 1519, but that history may well have been murky to the British of the time. After all, they were busy calling the natives of the Americas “Indians.”
Which brings us back to Thanksgiving. You could say that if, for the original meal, there were no turkeys, the turkeys were certainly around. And surprisingly, the ones that came from Europe through Mexico, that had been domesticated by the Mayans almost 2,000 years before that – and the wild turkeys roaming the woods of New England, a continent away – they were the same species. This is an incredibly adaptable bird.
Some of their adaptations are downright exquisite. I had the chance to hunt for urban turkeys (with camera, not gun) alongside Carter Heath, the Northeast regional director of the National Wild Turkey Federation. As we drove around in his truck with its vanity plates reading TRKYNRD (“Northeast Regional Director?” I asked; “Turkey Nerd,” he replied), he told me about how turkeys live in a world where, as he put it, “Everyone likes a turkey dinner.” Turkeys can eat whole acorns, for instance, storing them in their crop and scurrying away to crack them with their gizzards and digest them later, at leisure. “Turkeys loaf,” he told me. “That’s the technical term for when they lie in the sun and digest.” They’re also prepared for a world where, as Carter put it, “Everyone loves a turkey dinner.” Hens sometimes lose their entire clutch of eggs to predators such as coyotes and raccoons. To offset this, they can lay a replacement clutch – drawing on extra sperm that they store in their bodies, just in case, for weeks after mating.
It’s only been 20 years since turkeys moved into our Northeast cities and suburbs in large numbers. We’re both learning species; for evidence, look no further than our hunting. In the 200 years after the Pilgrims’ arrival, our guns and habitat destruction drove the wild turkey into local extinction. In 1973, the hunting organization Heath represents, the National Wild Turkey Federation, was integral to bringing them back, working closely with agencies including Scarpitti’s. Hunts now are closely managed for sustainability; fees support conservation lands; and there are programs such as Jakes (“Juniors Acquiring KnowlEdge and Skills”) to teach young people outdoor skills and awareness of laws and responsible practices. Also turkey calls, which Heath was eager to demonstrate with a glass-and-slate cherry wood pot. “For me,” he said, “that’s the hunt: the communication with another species.”
As for the turkeys, they’ve learned to live among us. Scarpitti estimates that Eastern Massachusetts is the most densely settled part of the state for humans and turkeys alike. Oh, and he’s confident they’ve had plenty of time to habituate to the Red Sox. As for him, he’s a Bruins fan, if anything. Bears are part of the job.
Greg Harris is the founding editor of the literary magazine Pangyrus and the founder and co-director of Harvard LITfest. His essays, reviews, and stories have appeared in The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Harvard Review, Jewish Fiction, Earth Island Journal and elsewhere.
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