Wild turkey was a favorite entrée on New England tables two centuries ago. Turkeys were locally abundant as late as the 1830s, when a typical market price for a 15-pound bird was 25 cents. (Too often our complacent forebears ate the breast meat and chucked the rest.) The double whammy of forest clearing and hunting—pen trapping and nighttime roost-shooting were particularly ruinous—doomed the species, however, and by mid-century the bird had been extirpated from most of its range.
A century later, as the reforestation of abandoned farms provided better habitat, fish and game departments took turns attempting to reintroduce the species by releasing game-farm birds. These birds—either wild-domestic turkey crosses or wild-egg hatches raised by domestic hens—looked promising enough, but most promptly died. They stood out in the weather; they trotted up to men in camouflage as if saluting old friends; and they starved.
Then a better idea came along. With the invention of cannon- and rocket-fired nets, it became possible to capture wild birds from isolated relict populations that had hung on in swamps and badlands. Many states jumped on the trap-and-transfer bandwagon, a reintroduction program so successful from coast to coast that Meleagris gallopavo is now more widely distributed than it was in pre-Colonial days. New turkey range includes northern Vermont and New Hampshire, where now-vigorous lowland and foothill populations numbering in the thousands have grown from original releases of 31 birds in southwestern Vermont in 1969 and ‘70 and 25 birds in the southern Connecticut Valley of New Hampshire in 1975, populations that advance up and retreat down river valleys in the Green and White Mountains as food supplies and weather dictate.
Speaking of food, summer and autumn are a literal picnic for New England turkeys. As Audubon put it, with uncharacteristic understatement, the bird’s diet is “not confined to any particular thing.” Young birds (called poults) mostly gobble animal food: grasshoppers, crickets, walking sticks, beetles, spiders, ticks, millipedes, and the like. Adults take insects and other invertebrates as well, but they depend largely on vegetable food: fruit of all kinds; the seeds of grasses, sedges, and weeds; waste grain, particularly corn; and green plants. They have a weakness for spring-beauty tubers, trillium bulbs, and violet blossoms. And their staple has long been hardwood mast, especially acorns and, formerly, chestnuts.
We northerners lack another food favorite, pecan, and much of high-latitude turkey range is oak-poor, putting these marginal populations at risk. Turkeys will opportunistically take larger arthropods (early colonists encountered them on Atlantic beaches chasing fiddler crabs!) and occasionally small vertebrates as well. Recently I was watching a small band of hens and half-grown poults through binoculars as they picked along the fencerow bordering our grown-up pasture when, to my astonishment, a hen snatched up, thrashed briefly, and choked down a good-sized garter snake.
The critical survival test here in the Northeast comes, of course, in winter. By the time the snows of November arrive, wild turkey flocks have split up. Young males leave family groups and band together, leaving the hens and young females to see the winter through in their own, smaller groups. Older males tend to gather into age-differentiated flocks of two-year-olds, three-year-olds, and old-timers. (As birds go, turkeys are long-lived, though a 10-year-old bird is probably rare in the wild.) If there is a good mast crop and snow depth is manageable, the flocks will stay in the woods, scratching for acorns and beechnuts. If the snow crusts over, the birds simply forage on top, turning their attention to sumac, grapes, rose hips, burdock, and the blown seeds of ash and hophornbeam. Deep powder snow or a general food-crop failure will force turkeys down into open agricultural areas, where they gather at open seeps in search of grasses, sedges, and the spore heads of ferns, and where they visit manure piles for undigested grain. They will follow a herd of white-tailed deer, scratching for food where the deer have scraped to bare ground. (The birds return the favor in orchards, where deer gather to clean up apples knocked down by fruit-eating turkeys.)
Unlike wintering songbirds, bulky turkeys do not have to eat every day to survive. Indeed, under controlled lab conditions, turkeys have lived without food for two weeks at 0 degrees Fahrenheit, losing in the course of the ordeal more than half their body weight. Turkeys survive periods of severe weather by simply sitting them out on the roost, under which conditions they have been known to refuse food placed directly beneath them. During extended stormy periods they hang on, like grouse, by eating the buds of trees and shrubs, hemlock leaves, lichens, fungi, and other low-nutrition foods. Seriously bad-weather winters in Vermont and New Hampshire undoubtedly result in some turkey mortality, but don’t count out the bird Audubon chose to grace plate #1 of his opus, “The Birds of America.” M. gallopavo is proving to be a tough customer its second time around.