Readers’ wildlife photos: Happy Thanksgiving!

November 27, 2014 • 4:41 am

Apropos the holiday, we have just one species to show, America’s wild turkey (Meleagris gallopavo). Happily, these turkeys won’t be eaten, for they’re wild and were photographed by readers.

First, we have three photos by reader Al Blazo, who is surrounded by the birds:

My wife and I live in an urban area of NE Ohio, adjacent to a large park.  Until about five years ago, seeing a turkey in this area was a very rare experience.  During the past five years, however, the turkey population seems to have exploded.
At the beginning of this spring we had two turkeys visit us on a semi-regular basis.  They produced a couple of offspring and then four turkeys were regular visitors.  As the summer rolled on, more joined the pack.  They come to feast on the whole and crushed corn that I put out for the ducks and bush birds that spend their afternoons in our back yard.  Now, 13 turkeys show up every day to chow down, sometimes two and three times a day! They are getting really huge.
Al blazo turkeys
The second photo shows one of the parents walking right up to me and the kitties looking for corn that I place at our bird feeding area.
photo 2
Turkeys and deer seem to have reproduced in abundance this year in the urban park where our house is situated. I’ve never seen as many as I’ve seen this year.  They’re actually starting to cause traffic jams as they mosey about the small 2-lane street in front of our house!
I was sitting in the garage this afternoon when I heard something walking on the roof.  Whatever it was, I thought, it sounded way too huge to be a squirrel or pigeon!  I walked into house so I could peer out the window at the garage roof.  And there it was. The other day I witnessed a turkey larger than the one shown here effortlessly fly, in literal helicopter fashion, straight up from the street (in front of my house) to the top of a dead tree.  The top of the tree was approx. 50′ above the street.  I had no idea that turkeys could fly so effortlessly, and so precisely.
Al blazo Turkey on roof
Reader Gregory James adds another photo:
This is probably not the quality you are looking for in terms of posting on WEIT, but it is cool nonetheless. I took it out my kitchen window earlier today, on the East Side of Milwaukee where we have had quite a number of local wild turkeys in the neighborhood for several years. They are quite tame and local kids can be found playing among them on the boulevard.  So, while our foxes are long gone, we still have interesting wildlife.  (We have a lot of human turkeys, too, of course. But they aren’t as much fun.)
GregorY James turkey
It’s a common belief among Americans that Benjamin Franklin proposed that the turkey and not the bald eagle become the national bird of the U.S. This turns out to be false, but he did denigrate the eagle in favor of the turkey. Here’s an excerpt from a letter from Franklin to his daughter, reprinted in Smithsonian magazine:

“For my own part I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen the Representative of our Country. He is a Bird of bad moral Character. He does not get his Living honestly. You may have seen him perched on some dead Tree near the River, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the Labour of the Fishing Hawk; and when that diligent Bird has at length taken a Fish, and is bearing it to his Nest for the Support of his Mate and young Ones, the Bald Eagle pursues him and takes it from him.

With all this injustice, he is never in good case but like those among men who live by sharping & robbing he is generally poor and often very lousy. Besides he is a rank coward: The little King Bird not bigger than a Sparrow attacks him boldly and drives him out of the district. He is therefore by no means a proper emblem for the brave and honest Cincinnati of America who have driven all the King birds from our country…

“I am on this account not displeased that the Figure is not known as a Bald Eagle, but looks more like a Turkey. For the Truth the Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America… He is besides, though a little vain & silly, a Bird of Courage, and would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his Farm Yard with a red Coat on.”

 

33 thoughts on “Readers’ wildlife photos: Happy Thanksgiving!”

    2. Those are pretty cool. A detail that the first paper argues, based on comparisons in DNA, is that the pheasants are a polyphyletic group. One group seems more related to the grouses and prairie chickens, and the other group falls out alongside the peafowls.
      The 2nd paper has fewer species, but it uses insertions of transposons (‘jumping genes’) to show phylogenetic relationships. It focuses on a class of transposons that insert into each other, resulting in a jumping gene inside another jumping gene. I have never heard of things like that.

    1. I saw that on TV & it’s a really great story. I like how in one scene they were filming all the turkeys walking as a group & grabbing anything they could eat, including a spider right from its web!

      1. Yes, I remember. I didn’t think large orb-weavers had that much to worry about, vis-a-vis predation. Here in Richmond, Va., every fall we usually have one or two large spiders span their nets from one tree to another here on our lot, but I haven’t seen any this year.

        1. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen many either & usually I see the baby ones hatching on the deck. My dog did pick one up, spit it out & looked at it. I was grossed out & made a big deal saying “ewwww you don’t put a spider in your mouth!” so she felt bad & decided she wanted to go inside. 🙂 Poor dog. The spider was all slobbered on so it probably at the worst experience from the three of us!

  5. I find turkeys are so strange. Once, I was driving along a country road & a bunch of hens started walking out so I stopped for them. They appeared not to think this was strange at all and about 10 of them went walking in front of my car with their necks stretched out…they looked like old ladies dressed up & behaving proper.

  6. Oh & happy turkey day, Americans! As GBJames points out above, Canadians already had their day off. When I was working, we had some of our staff out of Atlanta. It was great because it was sort of a mini-holiday for us because if you had to meet with them, you couldn’t do it until Monday so you got extra time to work on whatever you needed done.

  7. Who better to determine the moral character of Eagles and Turkeys than Ben Franklin.

    I believe the wild ones do fly some. The domestic livestock variety surely do not.

    1. We selectively bred these to (a) have so much breast meat that they are too front heavy, and (b) to have ‘white meat’ in their breast muscle. This has much less endurance than red meat muscle.

      1. Not only that, but the breasts of the males are so large that they can’t mount the females. Thus, to produce new turkeys, females must be artificially inseminated. Every turkey we eat on thanksgiving has been produced this way.

  8. No thanksgiving here, but tomorrow off anyway.

    Think I’ll stay up late and catch some of that sport with the funny looking ball.

    Happy day of noms yanks. 🙂

  9. As habitat has diminished in our formerly farming area, we have had coyotes, increasing numbers of deer and even a bear! Of course for years I have had quail, kestrels, red tail hawks even a nesting golden eagle and lately a true falcon! During a drought when I heavily watered my lawn a decade ago we had an American curlew nest in our yard! The little bright green tree frogs with their thin legs and sucker toes died out when a land speculator felled a small wood across the street: didn’t know that it was wetland forest and that no septic tanks could be put in. They never came back. One fall some strange keening bird wandered through my yard, about the size of a small turkey but feathered more like a giunes hen. Go figure.

  11. For decades now, my town has had a flock of wild turkeys, who probably originally adopted us. It’s now about 20 or 30 birds.

    They walk around downtown like Diana said, very proper and sedate. But when they cross a street in a more quiet area, like right in front of my house, they know that they need to squawk loudly to alert cars that they are coming.

    So they start screaming from behind my backyard, then run out en masse still screaming while they run across the road. The sound is amazing, you wouldn’t think it could be so loud and sound so strange. But, everyone loves them, and they roam freely.

  12. My Thanksgiving song:

    Thanksgiving is the harvest season
    I harvest my pumpkin
    You harvest your chick
    I sit in my pumpkin’ lap
    You hold your chick tight
    We watch the harvest moon together

  13. Blessed to be wild, as far as turkeys go around this time of the year.
    Why is an American bird named after Turkey, in what the Greeks called Asia? Is there some story behind that? Anyone?

  14. A few weeks or so ago I went with some friends to a wilderness area in one of the “gaps in the city” here in Ottawa. There’s a bird hosipital/rehab centre on site (which was unfortunately closed) and at the end of our walk we saw some gigantic weird looking birds that we realized must be semi-wild turkeys as they have been seen vaguely in that area. The movements were so *repilian* (though I have no real idea why) – that birds are dinosaurs was so obvious then.

  15. Really cool shots, Al & GB!

    We have a lot of turkeys here too, but we’re out in the country. The urban/suburban turkey phenomenon is so strange. Glad you two are co-existing well with your big birds; in some places–somewhere in California comes to mind–the turkeys are pretty ornery and chase people.

      1. Ha, ha, yes! But not, of course, in the long run. A few complaints and the turkeys need to be “managed.”

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