Wild Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo): Facts, Habitat and Behavior

Appearance: how to recognize a wild turkey

A wild turkey looks very different from the white farm turkey. Its body feathers are dark, with a metallic sheen of bronze, copper, green, red and gold that changes with the light. The wings are barred black and white, and the tail ends in a band of chestnut, buff or white depending on the subspecies.

The adult male, or tom, has a bare head and neck whose skin can turn red, white or blue. Hanging from the forehead over the bill is a fleshy flap called the snood, and under the chin dangles a wattle. Bumpy growths called caruncles cover the throat. Toms also have a beard, a tuft of coarse, hair-like feathers growing from the breast, and sharp spurs on the back of the legs. The details are explained in what is the red thing on a turkey?.

Females, or hens, are smaller and duller, with brown-edged feathers that camouflage them on the nest. Their heads are bluish gray with fewer bare patches, and about 10% of hens have a short beard. Young males, called jakes, have short beards and a tail fan with longer middle feathers.

Size: how big is a wild turkey?

The wild turkey is one of the heaviest flying birds in North America, and males are much larger than females.

Large studies put the average weight of adult toms at around 7.6 kg (17 lb) and of hens at about 4.3 kg (9.4 lb). Toms over 13.5 kg (30 lb) are uncommon, and the heaviest on record, listed by the National Wild Turkey Federation, weighed about 17 kg (37.6 lb). Domestic turkeys can be far heavier, which is one reason they cannot fly.

Habitat and range

Wild turkeys live in open woodland and mixed forest broken up by clearings, meadows, fields and river bottoms. Oak and beech woods are especially good habitat because they produce acorns and nuts. Trees are essential: turkeys need tall trees for roosting at night. They also do well around farmland and have moved into suburbs and even city parks in many regions.

Six subspecies are recognized. The Eastern wild turkey covers the eastern half of the United States and parts of southeastern Canada. The Osceola, or Florida, turkey lives in peninsular Florida. The Rio Grande turkey lives in the southern Great Plains and Texas, Merriam’s turkey in the Rocky Mountain region, and Gould’s turkey in northwestern Mexico and the borderlands of Arizona and New Mexico. The South Mexican turkey, the ancestor of domestic birds, lives in central Mexico.

Thanks to reintroductions, wild turkeys now live in every US state except Alaska, including western states such as California, Oregon and Washington, where they were not native, and on Hawaii. They have also spread far into southern Canada.

Diet: what do wild turkeys eat?

Wild turkeys are omnivores that feed mainly on the ground. They scratch through leaf litter with their strong feet and eat acorns, beechnuts, hickory nuts and other mast, along with seeds, grains, berries, wild grapes, buds, leaves, grasses, roots and ferns.

Animal food is important too, especially in summer. Turkeys eat grasshoppers, beetles, caterpillars, snails and other invertebrates, and occasionally small salamanders, lizards and snakes. Young poults depend heavily on insects in their first weeks, because they need protein to grow quickly.

Turkeys feed most actively in the early morning and late afternoon. In winter, when snow covers the ground, they rely on buds, evergreen leaves, seeds left in fields and fruit hanging on shrubs.

Flight, running and roosting

Wild turkeys are surprisingly athletic. They usually escape danger by running, and they are fast on their feet; a figure of about 40 km/h (25 mph) is commonly cited. When pressed, they burst into the air with powerful wingbeats and can fly fast for a short distance, usually less than about 400 m (a quarter mile), before gliding down to cover. Turkeys have been recorded flying at about 88 km/h (55 mph).

Every evening, wild turkeys fly up into trees to roost, often in the same group of trees night after night, and fly down again at dawn. Roosting off the ground protects them from coyotes, foxes, bobcats and other night predators. The full story of their flying ability is in can wild turkeys fly?.

Turkeys have excellent eyesight in daylight, with eyes on the sides of the head that give them a very wide field of view, and they see in color. Their night vision is poor, which is one reason they spend the dark hours in trees.

Behavior and communication

Outside the breeding season, wild turkeys live in flocks. Hens and their young form family groups that may merge into large winter flocks, while adult males often form separate small groups. Within each flock there is a clear pecking order, set by displays, chasing and occasional fights.

Turkeys are very vocal. Toms gobble, a loud, rattling call that can be heard up to about 1.6 km (1 mile) away, to announce themselves to hens and rival males, mostly in spring. Turkeys also yelp, cluck, purr, cackle and give a sharp “putt” when alarmed. Strutting males make a low drumming sound and a short “spit” by forcing air from an air sac in the chest. Learn more in why do turkeys gobble?.

Reproduction and life cycle

Breeding begins in late winter and spring. A displaying tom puffs up his body feathers, fans his tail, drags his wingtips on the ground and struts slowly in front of the hens, while his bare head glows red, white and blue. Males mate with as many hens as possible and take no part in nesting. Sometimes two related males display together as a team, with the dominant one doing nearly all the mating.

The hen makes a shallow scrape on the ground, usually hidden under brush or tall grass, and lays about 10–14 eggs, one a day. She incubates them alone for about 28 days. The chicks, called poults, are precocial: they hatch covered in down, with their eyes open, and leave the nest with their mother within a day. They feed themselves from the start and can make short flights and roost in trees with the hen within a few weeks.

Life is risky for ground-nesting birds. Raccoons, skunks, opossums, foxes, crows and snakes raid nests, and many poults are lost to hawks, owls and mammals in their first two weeks.

Lifespan

Most wild turkeys live only a few years. Studies have estimated an average life expectancy of less than two years once poult losses are included, and few birds pass five years. The oldest known wild turkey lived at least 13 years.

Predators and threats

Adult turkeys are hunted by coyotes, bobcats, gray wolves, cougars, golden eagles and great horned owls, while eggs and poults face a much longer list of predators. In the southeastern United States, American alligators also take turkeys near water. Adults can defend themselves with kicks, spurs and wing blows, and hens have been seen chasing hawks away from their poults.

Today the main pressures are loss and fragmentation of habitat and poor nesting success in some regions. Wildlife agencies in parts of the eastern United States have reported declining numbers since the 2000s and are studying the causes, which may include wet springs, predation and changes in forest habitat.

Conservation status and recovery

The IUCN Red List classifies the wild turkey as Least Concern, with an increasing population across its range as a whole. This was not always so. Unregulated hunting and forest clearing in the 1800s and early 1900s wiped turkeys out of much of their range. By the 1930s, by some estimates, only about 30,000 remained in the United States, and the species had vanished from Canada and at least 18 US states.

Recovery came from habitat protection, regulated harvests and, above all, “trap and transfer” programs, in which wild birds were captured in healthy areas and released into empty habitat. Early attempts with farm-raised birds failed because they could not survive in the wild. By 1973 the US population had grown to an estimated 1.3 million, and today the continent-wide population is estimated at around 6–7 million, one of the great success stories of North American wildlife conservation.

Myths and relationship with people

The turkey was domesticated in Mexico long before Europeans arrived, at least 2,000 years ago, and DNA evidence suggests ancient peoples of the American Southwest kept turkeys too, partly for their feathers. Spanish explorers took domestic turkeys to Europe in the early 1500s, where the bird got its confusing English name, explained in how did the turkey get its name?.

A popular myth says that Benjamin Franklin wanted the wild turkey, not the bald eagle, to be the US national bird. In fact, he never made such a proposal. In a 1784 letter to his daughter he criticized the eagle’s character and praised the turkey as a more respectable bird, but this was a private, half-joking remark. Another common belief is that turkeys are stupid and drown looking up at the rain; this is not true, and wild turkeys are wary, quick and hard to approach.

Today wild turkeys are a familiar sight in many towns, and a symbol of Thanksgiving in the United States. They are also sometimes confused with the turkey vulture, which got its name from its bare red head.