The wild turkey species is the ancestor of the domestic turkey, which was domesticated approximately 2,000 years ago. It has since been reassigned to the genus Paracrax, first interpreted as a cracid, then soon after as a bathornithid Cariamiformes. The density and tree species composition of their habitat varies geographically but they will make use of timber plantations as well as pasture and agricultural clearings. Most of the time when the turkey is in a relaxed state, the snood is pale and 23cm long. A wild turkey walks through a residential neighborhood in Brookline, Massachusetts. The effects of human development and the resulting habitat loss, as well as direct losses from hunting, reduced the wild turkey population drastically in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Pledge to stand with Audubon to call on elected officials to listen to science and work towards climate solutions. The Spanish are credited with bringing wild turkeys to Europe in 1519. By that time, the New England human population had migrated and condensed into cities, and forests and food had returned to much of theabandoned farmlands. It was these New England turkeys (the Meleagris gallopavo silvestris, according to a 2009 DNA study) that achieved new heights of culinary fame, while simultaneously offering a lesson in the complexities of colonialism. Photo: October Greenfield/Audubon Photography Awards. Not Every Animal Is Beef! For unrelated but similar birds, see . When British settlers got off the Mayflower in Massachusetts Bay Colony and saw their first American woodland fowl, even though it is larger than the African Guinea fowl, they decided to call it by the name they already used for the African bird. According to the zooarchaeologist Stanley J. Olsen in the Cambridge World History of Food, it was the ocellated turkey further south, not the turkey that is regarded as the Thanksgiving bird in the United States, that made the first leap toward world turkey domination. [44], The snood functions in both intersexual and intrasexual selection. But that warm welcome sometimes fades as the turkey-human scuffles continue to mount, and residents claim that the birds are a nuisance. While wild turkeys are capable of flight, domesticated turkeys cannot fly.
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