Gobbling up the history of wild turkeys
As we gather for the Thanksgiving meal, we might wonder what turkeys eat — not the store-bought birds on our plates but the wild turkeys that have roamed Mexico, Texas and eastern North America for millennia.
Aztecs kept wild turkeys in their villages as a source of food. The turkeys also served the Aztec villages as pest exterminators by eating creepy-crawly insects.
European explorers in the 16th century took wild turkeys home, where poultry farmers began a selective-breeding process, resulting in fat, meaty-breasted birds. Later, European colonists brought the new breed of domestic turkeys to the New World.
Domestic turkeys provide the feast for most Americans celebrating Thanksgiving, but they weren’t available to the Plymouth colonists and Wampanoag Indians at their 1621 harvest celebration, now called the first Thanksgiving. We’re not even sure what kind of fowl the pilgrims and Indians ate, although scant evidence indicates ducks and geese.
We do know what wild turkeys ate. They gobbled up — pardon the pun — vegetable matter such as tender grass shoots, plant tubers, weed seeds, nuts, and acorns on the grounds of forests and meadows. Their meat fare included insects, spiders, slugs, lizards, worms and small snakes. Nice feast, which they still enjoy.
In contrast, commercially grown domestic turkeys eat a controlled diet of corn and soybeans supplemented with minerals, vi-
tamins and antibiotics to induce thick white breast meat and thick thighs. Domestic turkeys have long since lost the ability to fly, and most are not allowed to roam freely.
Wild turkeys roam for food and water, which is part of what makes them leaner, stronger and far more cunning than domestic turkeys. Acute hearing enables wild turkeys to detect faint distant sounds, and keen eyesight that spans a 270-degree field-of-view provides them with sharp awareness of their surroundings.
The birds are colored in mahogany, copper and green, which provides extraordinary camouflage to make them virtually invisible within a forest. When alarmed, they can
get out of sight fast by flying 55 mph for a short distance or running at speeds of up to 25 mph.
Male turkeys, called “toms,” utter a gobbling call that can echo a mile away. Females, called “hens,” utter clucking sounds as do young birds called “poults.” A flock of wild turkeys waking up from their roost in a tree on Thanksgiving Day will utter a series of “tree yelps” to announce to each other that all is well, so let’s go eat.
Contact Lone Star College professor Gary Clark or photographer Kathy Adams Clark at texasbirder.net.