Turkey Island: Everything you want to know about Meleagris gallopavo

Here’s a reprise of a story published last Thanksgiving.

In certain parts of the Island, it seems as if nature has gone haywire, and our human habitat is being overrun. We’re talking turkeys here.

Although it’s hard to find any hard evidence, the flock of wild turkeys seems to have grown over the last few years.

It’s unclear why, but Beau Payne, who knows a thing or two about turkeys, said this week, “We don’t officially keep tabs on the turkey populations beyond anecdote and observation. The turkey population appears to be doing well, likely in part to the currently depressed fox population [the turkey’s most common predator] which is near the bottom of its population cycle.”

What Officer Payne has described in the past as “a tasty solution,” to reduce the numbers of gobblers is that the turkey season is open now and will run to Dec. 3, and hunters can use a bow or shotgun. Only one bird may be taken per hunter during the season.

Rara avis

Our turkeys are really not a problem, but can become annoying if a number of them decide to kick back on your patio or porch. One method to keep them from roosting near your favorite porch chair, or strutting around the patio and interfering with the plants, is fencing, but that might not be too effective either.

Even though these comedians of the avian world look clumsy, they can fly, so hopping a fence is no problem. When they take wing they’re as graceful as any bird, sometimes reaching speeds up to 50 miles an hour.

Officer Payne has advised Islanders to treat turkeys the same as any wildlife: “Observe and enjoy, but do not interact unless absolutely necessary.”

If you’ve ever been close to a wild turkey (and what Islander hasn’t), the first impression is how magnificently ugly they are, with the heads of space aliens and those dangling red wattles.

Rare birds, they’re most content being earthbound, strutting around with the could-care-less attitude of bored aristocrats.

They can also transform themselves in a flash into completely different beings, flaring out their feathers and changing the color of their fleshy necks to blue, gray or, being an American species, red, white and blue. The toms preen like this when they’re scared or angry or looking for love.

Mysterious beings

How the birds got to Shelter Island in the first place is a mystery. The National Wild Turkey Federation has found there are about seven million wild turkeys roosting in 49 states (Alaska is turkey-free), beginning to approach the numbers before Columbus landed, when there were about 10 million of them.

At the turn of the 20th century, it was a close call whether the wild turkey would survive. Hunting and loss of habitat were the factors decimating the American rafter. (Rafter is the correct word for a group of turkeys. At least that’s what author James Lipton, who wrote “An Exaltation of Larks,” maintains, and many ornithologists back him up. Lipton teased out the derivation of the term from a group of logs bound together to form a raft.)

An act of Congress saved the American turkey from extinction with the Wildlife Restoration Act passed in 1937, providing money for wildlife habitat enhancement programs.

According to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), turkeys were reintroduced to New York from Pennsylvania in 1959 when about 1,400 birds were let loose in the wild.

Now, the DEC reported, there are between 250,000 and 300,000 New York birds, so many that the state exported almost 700 wild turkeys to “Vermont, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware and the Province of Ontario, helping to reestablish populations throughout the Northeast.”

Born in the U.S.A.

They’re called turkeys because of a British misunderstanding. Mario Pei, a Columbia University professor of Romance languages, has written that turkeys, though American born and bred, were imported to Britain after a stopover in the Mideast.

The Brits called everything coming from that part of the world “turkey,” as in Persian carpets becoming “turkey” carpets.

Their All-American status was famously enshrined by Ben Franklin, who wanted to make the turkey our National Bird. It speaks volumes about Franklin’s personality that he preferred the basically gentle but fiercely independent, if cranky, turkey, to the predatory bald eagle.

The eagle, Franklin wrote, “is a bird of bad moral character; he does not get his living honestly … like those among men who live by sharping and 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 … For in truth, the turkey is in comparison a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America. Eagles have been found in all countries, but the turkey was peculiar to ours …”

Peculiar might be the last word, when it comes to all things turkey.

Happy Thanksgiving.