Talking Turkey

Every November, turkeys are suddenly everywhere. Paper hand turkeys on the fridge. Cartoon turkeys on napkins. A golden one in the middle of the table, surrounded by people who would rather not think about where it came from.

The real Wild Turkey gets a lot less attention. It is big, bronze, a little goofy, and far more capable than its reputation suggests. I learned that the hard way, with a crash, a mistake, and eventually one of my favorite birding memories.

So this Thanksgiving, let's talk turkey.

I had only been birding for a few months. Just days earlier, I had picked up my new Canon R7.

Then, near a local park, I saw a giant bird literally crash into a tree. Not land. Crash. What kind of bird is that big and that bad at landing?

I crossed the street to investigate. It was a turkey!

Honestly, I did not realize turkeys could actually fly. It turns out they can. They are just not graceful about it at all.

That first impression was a little unfair, though. Wild Turkeys can fly up to about 55 miles per hour in short bursts, and every night they fly up into trees to roost, safely out of reach of predators. Getting airborne is not the problem. The landings could use some work.

Of course I took pictures. My first turkey! Then I made the mistake every photographer eventually makes.

While culling, I missed the turkey photos. Then I formatted the card.

Gone. My first Wild Turkey, erased by me.

So I went hunting for recovery software. The good news is that it found the photo. The bad news is that it wanted me to pay before handing it over. So I did what any reasonable birder would do: I took a screenshot of the preview instead.

So this screenshot is the photo of my first turkey. It is low resolution and nowhere near my best work, but it is *my* turkey.

I did get a lot better, though.

If the crash was my funniest turkey moment, my favorite came later, up in Fairview at our company cabin.

[MIKE: two or three sentences of your own here. What did it sound like? How many toms, and how close? What time of year, and what were you doing when they started? This is your favorite memory, so it should be the heart of the section.]

A displaying tom is hard to miss. He puffs up his body feathers until he looks twice his size, fans his tail into a full circle, drags his wings, and struts slowly back and forth. The gobble is the famous part, but it is only part of the performance. His bare head can flash red, white, and blue, and that fleshy snood dangling over his bill grows longer as he gets worked up.

All of that is for the hens, who often seem much less impressed than I was.

For more of Utah's gamebirds, start with our Quail guide.

Every Thanksgiving, someone shares the same fun fact: Benjamin Franklin wanted the turkey to be our national bird.

Not quite. In a 1784 letter to his daughter, Franklin did call the turkey "a much more respectable bird" than the Bald Eagle. But the letter was satire, poking fun at a club whose eagle badge looked a bit like a turkey, and he never sent it. He never proposed the turkey for anything.

The eagle won, but it took a surprisingly long time to make it official. The Bald Eagle has been on the Great Seal since 1782. It only became the legal national bird in December 2024.

I have had my own eagle surprises. One day my wife texted me from the park, sure she and her friends were looking at a Golden Eagle. I drove over to see for myself. It was a juvenile Bald Eagle. I may have corrected the label, but it did not change the excitement. You can read that story in Birds Showed Up for Me.

And at a conference in San Diego, I had a run-in with Lincoln, a trained Bald Eagle who performs flyovers at Philadelphia Eagles games, standing calmly on the expo floor. Birding, apparently, happens indoors too.

Franklin would probably be happy to know the turkey is doing just fine without the title.

Here is a surprise: when pioneers arrived in Utah, there were no Wild Turkeys to greet them.

Turkeys had lived here long before. Native peoples kept them, painted them on rock walls, and wove their feathers into warm blankets. But by the time settlers showed up, the birds were gone.

One of those blankets, about 800 years old, is on display at Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum in Blanding. Researchers estimate it took around 11,500 turkey feathers to make. That is one cozy blanket.

Bringing them back took decades. Early attempts in the 1920s failed. In 1952, a handful of Merriam's turkeys from Colorado were released in the mountains near Moab, and they stuck. Later, Rio Grande turkeys from Texas and other states joined them.

Some of those birds arrived through some very creative trading. Utah once traded pronghorn to Texas for turkeys, and trout to Kansas. One deal sent elk to Kentucky, which sent turkeys to South Dakota, which then sent turkeys to Utah. Somewhere out there is a turkey whose family tree includes an elk trade.

Today Wild Turkeys are found across much of the state, from mountain cabins to neighborhood yards, sometimes crashing into a tree near you.

A turkey crashing into a tree. A formatted memory card and a screenshot that saved the day. Gobbling toms in Fairview. A "Golden Eagle" that turned into a Bald Eagle. A state that traded elk for turkeys.

None of these birds are perfect. The turkey cannot land, the eagle steals fish, and I cannot be trusted with a format button. But every one of them gave me a story.

So this Thanksgiving, before the turkey hits the table, take a minute to look for the wild ones. They might be strutting in a field, or roosting in a tree, or crashing into one.