Pity the poor turkey. Through no fault of its own, it has emerged as a byword for a misguided or foolish action, for a feckless or dimwitted person. Use the word just about anywhere in the English-speaking world outside the confines of the kitchen, and you’ll almost certainly offend. No one, after all, calls someone or something a turkey with intent to praise.
This all amounts to an unwarranted slander on the turkey, a creature of great usefulness to humans around the world. In nature, turkeys are neither stupid nor especially error-prone. Originally residents of the densely wooded Central American rainforest, they are easily able to find their way about in difficult terrain and to hold in mind a spatial map of their whereabouts, a cognitive skill that it seems few ground-dwelling birds share. Highly social animals, wild turkeys live in groups that are bound by a hierarchical “pecking order” that involves constant communication and learning. Turkey chicks are precocious, leaving the nest only a day or two after hatching; for their part, adults, wary of potential predators, are constantly alert, sleeping only four hours out of every twenty-four (as against an Anna’s hummingbird’s eleven or a Galápagos penguin’s thirteen). And, the psychological literature informs us, turkeys both wild and domesticated perform well on problem-solving and memory tests of many kinds.
Why did the turkeys cross the road? Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Reserve, New Mexico. Photograph by Gregory McNamee.
If the wild turkey has a fault, it may only be a certain guileless opportunism. It readily overcomes its natural fear of humans, it seems, if there is some material advantage to doing so—say, the promise of food or shelter. Drawing on evidence obtained at Mesoamerican and Southwestern American sites, archaeologists speculate that the wild turkey was drawn to human settlements because there it could easily obtain grain; doubtless a pest at first, the food-seeking turkey itself became a valued source of food, and the turkey seems not to have minded the tradeoff. Apart from the Muscovy duck, it is the only New World bird to have been so tamed.
An orphaned wild turkey. Photograph by Gregory McNamee.
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