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Drive west from New York and in as little as 90 minutes you can be lost in the continuous deciduous woodland that snakes all the way up from Georgia to the Canadian border. Climb a hilltop and the view is stupendous - Yankee forest in all directions. Bears live in there and, if you are lucky, you might encounter another large creature that haunts the under-storey. Early morning is best, especially to hear one. Apart from the occasional high altitude hum of jets heading for JFK Airport, the air is purged of all but natural sound. But the noise that rents the stillness has a weird, almost mechanical resonance. It's like a muffled door bang or a powerful engine coughing into life. And it is far away - maybe a mile off through the woods.
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Actually, it's the gobble of a wild turkey. The caller is probably an adult male (named a tom) hailing his mates. Your chances of seeing the birds on foot are slim. One report states that turkeys have extraordinary vision; they can literally see an eye blink at eighty yards. They also have excellent hearing. Biologists claim that if they possessed a keen sense of smell, it would be impossible to ever see one that didn't want to be seen. They can run at more than twenty miles an hour and fly at speeds exceeding fifty miles an hour. How can an ungainly item of poultry achieve these feats? When you finally clap eyes on one in the wild you begin to understand.
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Turkeys are lean, long and leggy. They are wily social animals and don't carry excess fat. The words 'farm fed' don't apply to their physique. Furthermore, they don't look like their domesticated brethren. The plumage is dark, blackish in the toms, and an iridescent riot of bronze, chestnut, emerald and purple. The sight of a shy troupe crossing a trail and slipping through endless tree-cover evokes an aura of pre-colonial America, a window on untamed wilderness. Except that much of it still exists, wild turkeys and all.
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However, the birds' fortunes took a calamitous nose-dive before common sense prevailed. The species' presettlement range was continent-wide and, with an estimated population of more than ten millon, the turkey became popular eating with the early colonists. The meat was cheap, selling at market for less than a penny a pound. Ironically, the popularity of the turkey gave it the distinction of being among the first of North America's wildlife to suffer from over-hunting. By the mid-1800s the breed had been extirpated from all but isolated pockets in the east and a similar fate soon befell populations in the midwest.
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Beginning in 1935, effective legislation gradually restored wild turkeys from the remnants of their population back into the forests from which they had been eliminated. Today the return of the bird is a true conservation success story. Although turkey hunting remains a major outdoors activity in America, the species no longer faces the threat of extinction. Into the bargain, thanks to the abandonment of farmland across large areas during the twentieth century, native forest has regrown extensively and provides plenty of habitat.
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One contradiction remains. How did the bird get its name? Believe it nor not, the species is named after Turkey - the country. Such a bizarre twist dates from the early importation route into Europe. The first Europeans to reach Mexico found that the Aztecs had domesticated a large mysterious fowl for the table. Very soon the birds were distributed over several European countries within 15 years of their discovery. At this time any product believed to originate from the Near East was called 'Turkish' which led, erroneously, to the edible American birds arriving at the English court being referred to first as Turkie-Fowl and then - confusingly for all time - simply turkey.
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