The turkey: an ode to a fascinating bird

There are two species of Turkeys, Meleagris gallopavo and meleagris ocellata. Gallopavo turkeys are native throughout North America and are confusingly referred to as both the domestic turkey and the wild turkey. The other species of turkey is native to the Yucatán Peninsula.

However, the turkey was not content to live life ignorant of the grandeurs of the world. William Strickland, a navigator, is thought to have been the man who introduced turkeys to England. To this day, the Stricklands can take pride in their turkey-festooned coat of arms granted to them in 1550.

Interestingly, the turkey was thought to be a bit of a delicacy as it was not native to England. It’s for this reason that in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the bird makes a small cameo as the upscale dinner Scrooge brings the impoverished Cratchit family.

There are a variety of theories as to how the bird got its name, but taking a cue from our infallible media, I am going to focus on the most interesting one. It’s thought that as guinea fowl and other wild game was traded around the world by Turkish merchants, these birds, though not turkeys, might have taken the moniker from the men who transported them.

And when settlers came to America, they gave the same name to the wild fowl they saw strutting about the new world.

Despite their fascinating history, sometimes it seems that only Ben and I truly understand the majesty of our fat, flightless friends. However, it’s easy to understand how someone might misconstrue the true beauty of the turkey when going through nomenclature of their anatomy. Turkeys are the proud owners of appendages known as the wattle and the snood.

The wattle is a piece of flesh which hangs off the beak. The snood is also a fleshy protuberance, but this comes off the forehead. Farmers will often cut the snood off (known as desnoodling).

Females preferentially mate with males with longer snoods. The appendages are also important during the courtship ritual itself. The male will strut in a circle around the hen he is trying to impress, extending his wattle as well as fanning out his tail feathers. As this is happening, the snood engorges with blood and elongates to a few inches below the beak. (If this process sounds familiar at all, you probably have a more exciting social life than the girl who writes about turkeys for fun.)

However, despite their snoods and their wattles, turkeys actually play important roles in the lives of people other than Ben Franklin. For example, the Aztecs had a turkey god known as Chalchiuhtotolin. Translated as “precious night turkey,” he was the god of pestilence and disease.

Apparently, this bejewelled deity was fearsome to behold and carried obsidian arrows (the logistics of which I don’t quite understand). Should you wake up in the morning to find that you have developed smallpox (not an uncommon occurrence unfortunately for the Aztec empire) you might believe that you were visited by the said precious night turkey.

I hope I’ve helped convince you of the impressive history of the turkey and the majesty of its being. And if you can’t look into the beady eyes of our best feathered friends and see the beauty there, then I hope you can at least see their resilience.

In the 1900s, turkeys were nearly wiped out, reduced to about 30,000 birds (which is within the World Wildlife Fund’s current estimations for the number of polar bears). However, today there are over seven million. Congratulations turkeys, you and your snoods live to strut another day.