I’m on Orcas Island for Thanksgiving, and although I’m vegan, others in the group are preparing a turkey for dinner. It may show a bit of looseness of association, but I checked and see that I have Wild Turkey on my San Juan Island, WA county list. That is a bit unusual in western WA as in WA most of the areas with WITU are east of the Cascades. From here is was not a big stretch for me to take a little time to research the story of the Wild Turkey populations in the U.S.
There are only two species of wild turkeys in the world, our Wild Turkey, Melaeagris gallapavo, and the Ocelated Turkey of Mexico and central america M. ocelata.
Before Columbus arrived, Wild Turkeys were common and an important source of food in the eastern part of the U.S. There are 6 subspecies of Wild Turkey, the eastern population M.g. silvestris covered the eastern half of the U.S. and parts of southern CanadaFlorida, and the Florida subspecies is M.g Osceola. In the western parts of the U.S. the subspecies M.g. meriami (Meriam’s subspecies) covered much of the intermountain areas, the Rio Grande subspecies, M.g. intermedia was mostly in the central plains states and parts of Mexico, and Gould’s Wild Turkey was in S.E. Arizona and S.W. New Mexico. A sixth subspecies, the Mexican Wild Turkey is felt to be extinct, but it is felt to be the predecessor of all the domestic wild turkeys being bred throughout the world today. This has become such a huge industry that in 2016 produced an estimated 7.5 billion pounds of meat.
Before the arrival of Europeans in the new world, there are estimated to have been about 10 million wild turkeys in the area that is now the lower 48 U.S. This population was decimated by multiple factors. Hunting for market was a big issue. By 1850 most of the virgin wild forests in the eastern U.S. had been cleared for farmland, so habitat loss was a big factor. After the Civil War the combination of logging, railroads to move harvested trees, and unregulated hunting continued. By 1920 only 21 of the 39 states (using current boundaries) still had wild turkeys. By 1925-1930 the total U.S. Wild Turkey population has estimated ranging from 30,000 (probably too low) to 200,000 (more likely).
By the 1930’s efforts to reintroduce wild turkeys to various areas were being tried. Lack of habitat, by the 1930’s did not seem to be a limiting factor. By then family farms were already being abandoned, and regrowth of trees in those areas provided excellent Wild Turkey habitat. The big issue was how difficult it was to live capture Wild Turkeys. Pole traps, pen traps, funnel traps and drop nets just didn’t catch them. Because of this efforts were made to capture and breed turkeys, and then release them to establish new breeding colonies. There is no evidence of this ever working. It turns out that wild mother Wild Turkeys have to teach their young techniques to survive, and captive bred turkeys just couldn’t survive without wild mothers to raise them. The few efforts at first felt to be working, turned out to be inmovement from existing populations into areas where birds had been released.
In the 1950’s techniques to capture Wild Turkeys were explored, and finally in 1951 in North Carolina Herman (Duff) Holbrook found he could use a cannon fired net that had been previously used to catch waterfowl could successfully catch Wild Turkeys. Over the next 6 years he managed to capture 241 Eastern Wild Turkeys, and released these birds in 8 locations in S. Carolina. At least half of these releases led to growing wild populations.
About the same time a W. Virginia hunter and biologist Wayne Bailey experimented with the cannon nets, and became so good at this that he captured wild birds and established over 20 locations across W. Virginia. By 1959 at least 31 states were working to establish WITU populations. This made WITU maybe the most extensively and comprehensively applied conservation activity anywhere in the world in the mid 20th century. As in conservation of duck and goose habitat, hunters were the primary source of funding and energy behind these efforts.
Estimates of WITU populations in the U.S show that the growth in the WITU populations has indeed been incredible. The estimated 320,000 in 2951 increased to 1.4 million by 1974, to 1.8 million in 1979, to 2.4 million in 1984, 4.1 million in 1994, and seems to have leveled off at somewhere over 6 million today.
The political power and business acumen of hunters and WITU conservationists was on display throughout the latter parts of this WITU introduction efforts. The Lacey Act of 1907 prohibited the interstate sale and transportation of wildlife. This meant that either the stated capturing to WITU to send across state lines had to donate the birds and accept the cost without reimbursement, or otherwise figure out the costs. Things like barter, where one state provided one type of wildlife in exchange for the WITU happened. Things like Large-mouth Bass, River Otter, and Ruffed Grouse were used. The political clout of hunters came to the forefront. A group called the National Wild Turkey Federation (NWTF) created a “”Super Fund” system that allowed each states NWTF chapter to hold part of the funds they raises to be used exclusively for Wild Turkey and hunting heritage projects. This freed states to introduce viable WITU populations, and from there the turkeys flourished so that now there are established WITU populations in every lower 48 state and in Hawaii.
Somewhat amazingly, despite the usual issues with introduced non-native populations having unintended consequences, except for being a nuisance to humans in some areas where they intrude onto peoples yards and annoy them, the introduced WITU have not been demonstrated to be a major detriment to native populations.
So the good news is that I now have WITU in many of the WA counties, several U.S. states.
Here are photos of several of the subspecies of WITU in the U.S. The re-introduction programs have mixed up the subspecies to a degree that in many areas pure subspecies are hard to find or differentiate, and interbreeding of introduced WITU of various subspecies had blurred the subspecies ID beyond practical application in the field.
Here are links to two of the primary sources of the info in this post.
https://www.nwtf.org/_resources/dyn/files/75706989za3010574/_fn/Wild+Turkey+Population+History+and+Overfor view.pdf?Compare
https://blog.nature.org/science/2014/11/24/great-turkey-shuffle-restoration-gobbler-genetics-conservation/
http://www.nwtf.org/hunt/article/wild-turkey-subspecies
When I stumbled across the Birdsong Podcast I just loved it. I felt like I was spending a little time birding in with a friend in a area with a representative eastern U.S. avifauna. I heard the narrator quietly walking through the woods, marshes and fields while giving a quiet play-by-play, or really bird-by-bird narrative of what we were hearing. It is simple, novel and well done. Just flat-out cool stuff for a birder to hear IMHO.
