A wild male turkey puts on a colorful display to attract a female near the headquarters at Aransas National Wildlife Refuge Headquarters in Texas.

Editor’s note: Jim Welch was the host of SCETV’s NatureScene for 20 years. In Stories of the Trail, Welch shares his knowledge of some of the animals he studied and encountered while filming NatureScene . Working with him was Allen Sharpe, producer, director, video–grapher, and editor; and Rudy Mancke, naturalist.

The turkey

With Thanksgiving just around the corner many of us turn our thoughts to home and to the traditional meal of turkey with all the fixings. What might have happened had Benjamin Franklin succeeded in making the wild turkey our national bird? “The turkey is more respectable than the thieving, scavenger bald eagle,” Franklin told our nation’s leaders when he defended his choice. But the majestic eagle won the election, and the turkey ended up on the dinner table.

Wild turkeys were abundant throughout the eastern US and as far south as Mexico until heavy pressure from hunting and habitat destruction did them in. Extirpated from most of that habitat by 1850, only a small population remained in what is today the Francis Marion National Forest of SC’s coastal plain.

John Lawson, the first naturalist to explore the Carolinas wrote in his book, A New Voyage to Carolina , published in 1700, “I have seen 500 in a flock; some of them very large. I have been informed of one that weighed near 60 pounds.” 

The turkey got its name when Spanish explorers took a few of the birds from the Aztecs in Mexico back to Europe where they were confused with guinea fowls. The guinea fowl was known as a turkey in areas of Europe because some of the domesticated flock there had been imported from Turkey.

The wild turkey is a streamlined version of the barnyard turkey and has rusty wing tips in place of the white tips customary to domesticated birds. Although a domestic tom may tip the scales at as much as 50 pounds, a tom in the wild can be expected to weigh little more than 10 to 16 pounds. Even then, he is larger and brighter than the wild hen. He is bronze and iridescent and has a naked bluish head with a red wattle, a long loose piece of skin extending from the lower jaw along the neck. 

NatureScene and

the turkey

While shooting a NatureScene segment on location in Missouri, we spotted a large flock of turkeys walking along a country road. We stopped our truck and set up the camera in hopes for video of the birds. When the turkeys dove into the woods, Rudy Mancke and I devised an excellent plan to circle the forest and drive the flock toward Allen Sharpe, NatureScene’s cinematographer. Rudy circled from the left and I circled from the right. Our experiment not only failed, but I was nearly knocked down by a speeding turkey, as he flew some four feet off the ground. It seemed the entire flock had taken to the air when Rudy entered the woods and I had the misfortune of being positioned between them and freedom.

Our largest sighting was in Socorro, New Mexico at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge, commonly known for its thousands of snow geese and sandhill cranes, has also become home to several flocks of hundreds of turkeys. A strategic management of Bosque Del Apache’s fields and forests has made for an extremely inviting habitat.

SC and

the turkey

Our own SC now has turkeys in every county, perhaps as many as 120,000 in the state. For the past 10 years I’ve spotted them near my house in the country.