50 Fun Facts About Turkeys

Where do wild turkeys spend the night, since their vision is very poor after dark?

Wild turkeys roost in trees, flying up at twilight to get well off the ground, and in snowy regions they sit out blizzards in conifers.

Which Founding Father's letter to his daughter began the myth that he wanted a turkey as national bird?

Benjamin Franklin was really criticising the Society of the Cincinnati and the eagle on its crest. He never publicly proposed the turkey or opposed the bald eagle as a national symbol.

Which children's television show covers its eight-foot-tall star's costume in tail feathers taken from turkeys?

Sesame Street dresses Big Bird in turkey tail feathers, and its makers are said to reject roughly 90 percent of the feathers picked for the costume.

After a huge conservation comeback, wild turkeys now live in every US state except which one?

Alaska is the lone holdout, while even Hawaii has wild turkeys, released there in the late 1950s.

People in which present-day country first domesticated the turkey, centuries before Europeans ever saw one?

Mexico is where turkeys were first tamed, prized for meat, eggs and feathers. The farmyard birds now eaten worldwide descend from that stock, carried across the Atlantic in the 1500s.

Which amino acid in turkey meat is wrongly blamed for the drowsiness that follows a big holiday dinner?

Tryptophan is no more plentiful in turkey than in other table birds, so the bird is innocent. The carbohydrate-heavy dishes served alongside do more to bring on the after-dinner slump.

In which sport is a streak of three consecutive strikes by one player known as a turkey?

Bowling calls three strikes in a row a turkey. Two in a row is a double, and four has been nicknamed a hambone.

Male wild turkeys sometimes attack parked cars after mistaking what on the shiny paintwork for a rival bird?

Their own reflection looks like an intruder, so males peck and kick at cars and windows to defend territory. Wild turkeys are otherwise rarely aggressive unless cornered or harassed.

Female turkeys prefer males with a longer version of which fleshy flap that dangles over the beak?

Snood length signals health: long-snooded males carry fewer gut parasites, and rival males back down from them. The flap fills with blood and stretches well past the beak during courtship.

In which Charles Dickens story does a reformed miser buy a prize turkey for his clerk's family?

A Christmas Carol has Scrooge send the Cratchits a turkey, then still a luxury in Britain. Intensive farming from the late 1940s finally made the bird cheap enough for most families.

What is the proper name for a baby turkey, which can leave the nest within a day of hatching?

A poult hatches after about 28 days of incubation and is on its feet fast: the whole brood leaves the ground nest within 12 to 24 hours.

Which first name do Americans give an adult male turkey, the same one used for a male cat?

Tom is the usual American term, alongside gobbler, for a bird much larger than the female, with plumage that shines red, purple, green, copper and gold.

What are adult male turkeys called in the United Kingdom and Ireland, a name also given to antlered males?

Stags is the term in Britain and Ireland, where farmers from the 17th century onwards walked whole flocks to the London markets on foot.

In which season do male wild turkeys gobble most, announcing themselves to females and rival males?

Spring is gobbling season, and the call can carry up to a mile. Weather can quieten the birds, with air pressure, rain and temperature all blamed for silent mornings.

Turkeys first reached Europe around 1519 through which country, where aristocrats quickly took to them?

Spain received the first turkeys from the New World, and the birds were an immediate hit with the aristocracy. They had reached England by 1541.

The French word for turkey, dinde, is short for a phrase meaning 'chicken of' which country?

India lends its name to the bird in several languages: Norwegian, Swedish and Estonian call it after the port of Calicut, now Kozhikode.

Which African bird, traded to Europe through Turkey, was called a 'turkey cock' before the American bird was?

Guineafowl were the original turkey cocks, and English colonists reused the name for the similar-looking American bird. The turkey's genus name, Meleagris, is also Greek for that African species.

Most farmed turkeys are bred to have feathers of which colour, so stray pin feathers barely show on the carcass?

White plumage hides leftover pin feathers on a dressed bird, which is why it displaced the wild-type bronze on commercial farms from the 1960s.

Which large reptile preys on wild turkeys of every age in the US Southeast when they stray too near water?

Alligator attacks are one hazard among many: raccoons, skunks and opossums raid the ground nests, yet humans are now the leading predator of adult turkeys.

Hunters locate male turkeys by imitating which other bird, whose call shocks them into gobbling back?

Owl hoots trigger a 'shock gobble', a reflex reply to sudden loud noise that gives away a male's position. Thunder and even a train whistle can set it off too.

The ocellated turkey, the only species besides the wild turkey, lives mainly on which peninsula?

Yucatán forests spread across three countries hold the entire species. Maya nobles and priests seem to have prized it, and the bird appears in their manuscripts.

The ocellated turkey is named for spots on its tail feathers that resemble what?

Eyes seem to stare from every tail feather: each carries a bronze spot, or ocellus, finished with a bright gold tip.

The ocellated turkey has a bare head of which colour, studded with orange nodules?

Blue skin covers the head in both sexes, and in the breeding season males add a swollen, fleshy crown that brightens to yellow-orange.

About one in ten female wild turkeys also grows which bristly chest tuft normally seen on males?

A beard is really a tuft of coarse, hair-like feathers sprouting from the centre of the breast, and it keeps growing throughout the bird's life.

Male wild turkeys spar with rivals and kick at predators using which sharp growths behind their lower legs?

Spurs make a cornered male dangerous: by kicking, biting and ramming he may drive off predators as large as mid-sized mammals.

What name is given to a male turkey's courtship display of fanned tail, puffed feathers and dragging wings?

Strutting comes with sound effects: gobbling, a low drumming and a sharp spit of air, all used to show dominance and to attract females.

Wild turkeys can fly about a quarter of a mile, but how do they usually escape an approaching predator?

Running is the first choice for adults and chicks alike; flight is a short, fast last resort, usually kept close to the ground.

Among native North American birds, only which species reaches a higher maximum weight than the wild turkey?

Trumpeter swan aside, nothing on the continent tops it, and the wild turkey is the heaviest of all the gamebirds, the order that includes chickens, quail and grouse.

Which muscular organ lets a toothless turkey grind up whole acorns, helped by swallowed grit?

The gizzard is a thick-walled second stomach found in every bird, and the grit held inside it does the work of teeth.

Which 1620 settlers brought farm turkeys from England, unaware that wild ones already filled the Massachusetts woods?

The Pilgrims' birds had made a round trip: tamed in Mesoamerica, shipped to Europe, then carried back across the Atlantic as English farm stock.

Which protein pigment, plentiful in the legs but scarce in the breast, gives a turkey its dark meat?

Myoglobin makes dark meat need more heat to cook through than the breast, which is why cooks brine the bird to keep the breast from drying out first.

A turkey's wishbone is formally called the furcula, a Latin name meaning a little version of which utensil?

Fork is the meaning, after the bone's two-pronged shape, and some dinosaurs had one too. The English name wishbone is only recorded from 1860.

Because males of the main commercial turkey breed are too heavy to mate safely, how are farm hens made fertile?

Artificial insemination lets one male serve several hens, so farms keep fewer males. Heritage breeds are defined partly by still being able to mate naturally.

Bones of an extinct Californian turkey are a very common fossil find at which Ice Age site?

La Brea Tar Pits bones reveal a stockier bird with a shorter, wider beak. It died out about 10,000 years ago, probably through drought and hunting by newly arrived people.

US wild turkeys rebounded from about 30,000 birds in the 1930s mainly through which conservation method?

Trap and transfer meant netting surplus wild birds and moving them to empty habitat. Earlier releases of hand-reared turkeys had failed because those birds could not survive in the wild.

A flock of turkeys shares its collective noun with which timber in the frame of a roof?

Rafter is the traditional word, fitting for intensely social birds: a turkey kept apart from its companions becomes very distressed.

What is a young male wild turkey called, a bird told apart by longer feathers in the middle of his tail fan?

A jake's uneven fan is the giveaway, because the tail feathers of a fully adult male are all the same length.

The wild turkey's species name, gallopavo, joins the Latin word for fowl with the Latin for which showy bird?

Peacock is 'pavo' in Latin, and the comparison kept coming back: an extinct turkey from California was first described in 1909 as a kind of peafowl.

Turkeys belong to the same bird family as partridges, grouse, junglefowl and which long-tailed game birds?

Pheasants give the family Phasianidae its name. Turkeys were long placed in a family of their own until a 2007 genetic study grouped them with the pheasants.

Before turkey became affordable, which bird was the usual festive roast for working-class families in Britain?

Goose remained the predominant roast until the Victorian era, even though turkey had been reaching wealthier English tables since the 1500s.

Florida's own wild turkey subspecies, first described in 1890, is named after which famous Seminole leader?

Osceola turkeys are the smallest subspecies, dark-winged birds of palmetto scrub that also visit swamp edges, where amphibian prey is plentiful.

Which wild turkey subspecies, the first Europeans met in the wild, is also the most hunted?

Eastern birds have one of the largest ranges of any subspecies, from Maine to Missouri and north into Canada. They were first named the 'forest turkey' in 1817.

Guajolote, a word for turkey that outlived the Aztec Empire, comes from which language of the Aztecs?

Nahuatl speakers called the bird huehxolotl, and their word has stayed in everyday use for centuries after the empire fell.

The Aztecs associated the turkey with which trickster god, perhaps because of the bird's comic behaviour?

Tezcatlipoca could take the form of Chalchiuhtotolin, the Jade Turkey, a god of disease and plague who was also able to cleanse people of guilt.

William Strickland, credited with bringing turkeys to England, displayed the bird on what in 1550?

His coat of arms featured a 'turkey-cock in his pride', and the official record of the crest is said to be the oldest surviving European drawing of a turkey.

Eggs of some turkey breeds can develop without ever being fertilised, a process known by which name?

Parthenogenesis has also been recorded in sharks, snakes and Komodo dragons, as well as in a few other domesticated birds.

Which parasitic disease, carried by chickens that suffer far less from it, often kills turkeys?

Blackhead is caused by a protozoan that travels inside worm eggs, and those eggs stay infective for four years in soil where chickens have fed.

Why does a lesser male wild turkey help a dominant partner court females instead of displaying alone?

They are close relatives, sharing about half their genetic material, so a helper still passes on family genes. The dominant male of a pair fathers about six more eggs than a lone male.

What are the bumpy, fleshy growths on a turkey's bare head and neck called, which swell and redden in display?

Caruncles take their name from the Latin for a little piece of flesh, and each bird's pattern is distinct enough to tell individuals apart.

Which artist chose the wild turkey as the very first plate of his monumental The Birds of America?

John James Audubon drew every species life size, which explains the contorted poses of his larger birds. The turkey is perhaps the most famous plate in the book.