The Wild Turkey: King Of The Hill
by Joel M. Vance
It is the time called false dawn. Tiny birds flit from branch to branch, chirping almost inaudibly, as if reluctant to disturb the thick spring hush.
A brassy cardinal doesn't care, noisily proclaims it is "Pretty! Pretty! Pretty!" Crows gossip across the valley. A barred owl gargles. That does it. The king of the ridge has had enough from his uppity subjects.
The wild turkey gobbler's strident challenge rings down the ridge, a tenor rattle that carries and, if you are an aficionado of wild turkeys, makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck.
It is a sound that once was as absent from most of this country's ridgetops as the bawl of a woolly mammoth. Turkeys have made a remarkable comeback since their low ebb a half-century ago. A mid-1930s game study in Missouri estimated no more than 2,000 turkeys statewide. Now, Missouri hunters routinely kill more than 80,000 annually and, despite that total, the worst enemy turkeys have is nesting season weather, not hunters.
Everyone knows how the Pilgrims sat down to turkey dinner with the Indians at the first Thanksgiving. Benjamin Franklin lobbied for the turkey as the national bird because its morals were superior to those of the eagle. But turkeys were a staple food for Indians long before the Pilgrims sat down to the first Thanksgiving dinner. They had been domesticated both by Indians in the southeast and the southwest. Pueblo Indians used feathers, bones, and eggs, as well as meat (the Apaches apparently didn't like the taste and didn't eat turkeys).
Turkeys also were important in Mexico and Central America--the Aztecs had domesticated them long before Cortez arrived in 1519. According to one historian, Montezuma kept so many birds of prey that they ate an estimated 500 turkeys a day!
Spanish explorers took Mexican turkeys back to Europe in the 1500s. People immediately confused them with more familiar birds, like the peacock. It's hard to believe anyone could lump together the peacock, with its gaudy tail and agonized cry, and the gobbler, with its trim fan and resounding gobble, but many European naturalists considered them variations of the same bird.
Most pioneers didn't bother to raise domestic turkeys because there were so many wild ones they didn't need to, but the wild bounty didn't last. Settlers cleared the woods that turkeys depended on and relentlessly killed them for food. Some speculate that disease from domestic turkeys also decimated the wild birds.
Whatever the causes, Connecticut had lost its last wild turkey by 1813. Wild birds were gone from Massachusetts, Pilgrim country, by 1851 (the last bird, ironically enough, was seen at a place called Mount Tom). By the 1950s, there were less than 100,000 turkeys nationally.
Now there are at least three million, probably more.
The remarkable revival came because of protection that let the few remaining birds procreate in peace and through a trap-and-transplant program that introduced turkeys to good unoccupied habitat.
Missouri is among the top turkey states (Alabama, Florida, and Pennsylvania are other leaders). Perhaps no state has tinkered with turkeys more than Missouri, both restoring the birds and using them as coin to barter with other states for everything from grouse to prairie plant seed.
Wild turkey enthusiasts owe a debt of gratitude to an Englishman: Sir Peter Scott, son of explorer Robert Scott who died on a trek to the South Pole. The younger Scott wanted to catch geese to band them for research (he founded a network of waterfowl refuges in Great Britain after World War II). His invention used rockets that fired a net over baited waterfowl.
Howard Thornsberry, a mechanical wizard, and his boss, Herb Dill, refined the rocket net at Missouri's Swan Lake National Wildlife Refuge, using "cannons" (which actually were a tube like a mortar) that fired weights to which the ends of the net were attached. Geese came to a baited site and hidden researchers shot the net over them.
Turkey biologists had been scratching their heads over a way to catch enough birds to transplant to new places. The cannon net came along at just the right time.
Now it was possible to catch a dozen or more turkeys with a single shot. Within a few years, the transplanted flocks were huntable. Today, wild turkeys are nearly everywhere, even in metropolitan areas (Swope Park in Kansas City has a flock).
There are six species of wild turkeys, all New World: the Eastern (the bird of the first Thanksgiving), Merriam's, Rio Grande, Florida (also called Osceola), Mexican, and an odd family offshoot that lives in Yucatan. Wild turkeys are slimmer than their portly barnyard cousins, with pink legs, compared to the gray or black legs of a domestic bird. All but the Mexican have brown tailfeather tips. Today's domestic turkey, descended from Mexican turkeys, has white tailfeather tips like its south-of-the-border ancestor.
Gobblers are nearly twice as large as hens. Depending on location, they can be anywhere from 15 to nearly 30 pounds. The normal wild gobbler is about 20 pounds. Some of the larger wild gobblers probably have been romancing in nearby barnyards, picking up some domestic Big Bird genes.
Hunters dream of a Grand Slam, which is the four species that live in the United States, or a Royal Slam, which includes the Mexican turkey.
LeRoy Braungardt, a Missouri hunter, has taken five Grand Slams with bow and arrow and still hopes to realize a Royal Slam with the bow. En route to a Mexican turkey hunt, he huddled in the back of a pickup as bandits fired automatic weapons at the truck. Understandably rattled, he later missed his shot at a Mexican gobbler.
Most hunters use shotguns and in some Western areas, rifles are legal. Turkeys can be legal game either in the spring or the fall. Spring hunts involve calling lust-addled gobblers by imitating hens.
The art of turkey calling has become the subject of videos, training tapes, and countless contests. The best callers almost inevitably begin to market their skills by selling calls, training aids, camouflage, or other paraphernalia of the hunt. Eager hunters pay theater ticket prices to attend seminars on turkey calling.
Hunters brag about how "smart" wild turkeys are. No turkey ever will write the great American novel or even pass basic high school math, but they are wary and they have a couple of tools far sharper than the hunter: hearing and sight. It's estimated that a turkey can see perhaps five times better than a man and hear up to eight times more acutely.
Braungardt claims there are more than 50 distinct turkey sounds and can imitate every one of them, sometimes several at once (he might yelp like a hen or a young gobbler with a mouth call, shake a gobbler call with one hand and slap his thigh with a turkey wing with the other, as if two gobblers were fighting over a hen.
Calling like a gobbler in a woods full of hunters is asking for trouble, so Braungardt hunts from a "blind" of his own invention, a tall, circular tent that he packs to his hunting site. If he can't be seen, he's less likely to be shot by a careless fellow hunter.
Turkey hunting statistically is more dangerous than stalking lions or tigers. Every spring sees many accidents, some fatal, where one hunter shoots another. Virtually all are the result of the victim being "mistaken for game," and virtually all are because of carelessness.
The National Wild Turkey Federation, an Edgefield, South Carolina organization with 72,000 members, leads a campaign for safer hunting, as well as donating money to states for turkey research and management. Turkey hunting gradually is becoming safer as more and more hunters have safety drummed into them.
So, the typical hunter is enjoying a spring morning on a wooded ridgetop. He has heard the gobbler answering the crows and owls and his adrenaline is flowing. He's forgotten the cold dampness that has soaked through his britches and the sharp rock under his rear end. He's forgotten the cold that slowly chilled him as he waited in the dark.
The first warm breath of the sun touches his shoulder and he yelps softly, tentatively with his mouth caller, as if a hen were stretching on her high tree limb roost and inquiring if everyone had a good night.
The gobbler answers, loudly and immediately. He is awash in hormones, robbed of his usual caution. The gobbler double gobbles, one after the other in quick succession.
The hunter feels his heart thudding. His throat is dry. The gobbler flies down from the roost, a loud flapping in the still spring woods. There is aching silence.
Will the bird come to his call? Should he call more or just wait? He begins to itch. A tick is crawling across his back, but he can't move. He feels the tickle of a cough. He can't cough! He wants to sneeze. Somehow he fights it back.
The silence deepens. It's a waiting game. Is the gobbler stepping cautiously through the brush toward him or has it just wandered off?
He tries a cluck, a sharp sound like two wood blocks knocked together. The gobbler thunders in front of him, out of sight, a sound like a dark storm. It "drums," a spitting sound, followed by a rumbling whoosh like a distant car accelerating.
The hunter needs to swallow, but there's no saliva; he is shaking. Was it this way for Daniel Boone?
Then he sees the gobbler, in full strut, its great tail fanned, body puffed to maximum size, red head tucked into its shoulders, beard dangling from its breast. The bird's eye is as big as a marble, fixed right on him. He feels as naked as a specimen on a dissection table. He knows the bird sees right through the camouflage clothing to the quivering hunter inside.
The gobbler glides behind a tree, like a stately cruise liner, and he raises his gun and flicks off the safety. He trains the muzzle on the spot where the gobbler's head will emerge. He waits.
Eons pass. His arms begin to tremble. His hands are sweaty. Now, again, he feels the tick, the cough, the sneeze.
Nothing happens. Finally, he lowers the gun, baffled. Some time later, groaning with effort, he levers himself to his feet, walks to the tree. The gobbler, for whatever reason, had turned and wandered down the hill, masked by the tree.
The hunter stands, feeling empty disappointment, tired and itchy, with eyes hot from too little sleep and too much oak pollen.
Somewhere down the hill there is a single shot. Someone else's shot.
That's turkey hunting.
Calls of the Wild
Spring hunters imitate a lovelorn hen, fall hunters try to break up a flock and call the scattered birds back with a lost hen call.
Once, experts recommended hunters give three yelps only, but today good hunters have an astonishing array of calls--mating yelps, tree yelps, lost yelps, pitts, putts, perts, purrs, clucks, and fly- down cackles.
This is done with an equally astonishing array of mechanisms, but the most prevalent is a mouth caller, small a U-shaped device that fits on the roof of the mouth like a cough lozenge.
Some scrape a peg against a piece of smooth slate or rub a lid of chalked wood against the edge of a small box. Still others suck on a hollow tube which can be a commercial call or the shell of a ballpoint pen (old-timers use the wing bone of a turkey, an ironic double-cross).
Where the Name Came From
Turkeys are no more from Turkey than Indians are from India.
Turkeys were confused with guineas, which had come to Europe from Turkey and that probably accounts for the name. But they also were confused with peafowl. The Latin species name of the wild turkey is Meleagris gallopavo and "pavo" is Spanish for peafowl.
Two wild turkeys are named for individuals: the Osceola (Florida) for a great Seminole Indian chief and the Merriam's for C. Hart Merriam, first chief of the U.S. Biological Survey which evolved into the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
For more information on efforts to expand the range of the wild turkey, contact the National Wild Turkey Federation, Box 530, Edgefield, SC 29824-0530, phone 803-637-3106.
