It can trot up to 25 mph, take wing at more than 55 mph, hear an acorn drop in a windstorm, see predators 100 yards away, alert the forest to approaching danger with distinctive calls, and disappear in plain sight.
There were countless millions of Meleagris gallopavo, or wild turkeys, across what is now the United States in 1621 when the Wampanoag Tribe taught Plymouth Colony newcomers how to trap the native fowl in Massachusetts.
Yet when President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863, turkey had disappeared from New England, and by the 1930s, there were fewer than 30,000 subsisting in isolated swamps in the Southeast and in the Allegheny Mountain Range of the Appalachians in Pennsylvania and New York, according to the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership….
How Saving the Wild Turkey Is Benefiting the American Wild
