Animal · United States, Canada, Mexico
Wild turkey
Meleagris gallopavo — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The wild turkey is a large forest bird of North America that nearly died out in the 1930s and today numbers in the millions again. Its comeback is one of the great success stories in conservation.
Picture credit: Judy Gallagher (CC BY 2.0) · Frank Schulenburg (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the wild turkey live?
Home: Hardwood and mixed forests of North America.
In the wild it lives in these countries: the United States, Canada, Mexico.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: 76–125 cm long, wingspan 125–144 cm. It weighs about 6 kilograms. On the menu: both plants and meat.
The story behind it
By the late 1930s, wildlife managers reckoned that fewer than thirty thousand wild turkeys were left in the whole of the United States — a bird that had once filled the eastern forests was nearly gone. What brought it back was patient and very physical work: catching surplus birds with a net fired from a cannon, carrying them to a forest where turkeys no longer lived, releasing them and doing it again. By 1973 there were 1.3 million. Today there are around seven million. The other thing people get wrong about this bird is the flying. A farmyard turkey can barely lift off; a wild one flies fast beneath the treetops, threading between trunks, though usually for no more than about four hundred metres. It roosts in trees at night, which is exactly why it needs to be able to get up there.
Find it on the globe
Wild turkey is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Can a turkey fly?
A wild one can, and well — fast and low beneath the treetops, usually up to about four hundred metres. A farmyard turkey has been bred so heavy that it barely can.
How was the wild turkey saved?
By moving birds, not by breeding them. Wildlife teams caught wild turkeys in nets and released them in forests where the species had vanished, over and over, for decades.
Where do turkeys sleep?
In trees. They spend the day on the ground and fly up to a branch at dusk, which puts them out of reach of foxes and coyotes overnight.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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