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Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman.
For millions of Americans, Thanksgiving is simply not Thanksgiving without turkey. The bird is native to North America. And yet by the middle of last century, the most likely place to find one was on the dinner table.
A combination of deforestation, agricultural expansion, and overhunting almost brought America’s favorite gobblers to the brink of extinction in the wild. But these days, across the U.S., there are more than six million wild turkeys, up from a low in the 1930s that some observers estimated to be as few as roughly 30,000 birds.
Here to tell us more about the species conservation success story is Michael Chamberlain, National Wild Turkey Federation Distinguished Professor at the University of Georgia.
Thanks for taking the time to chat with me today, Michael.
Michael Chamberlain: Glad to talk to you.
Pierre-Louis: So I think when people think about charismatic critters, they think of bears or coyotes or wolves, and if they think about birds at all, they might think of eagles and hawks; they probably don’t necessarily think of the turkey. Why have you dedicated your career to sort of studying the humble gobbler?
Chamberlain: Yeah, so I got an opportunity in graduate school to kind of pick the research project that I was working on, and one of the options was to work with wild turkeys, and I grew up, as a young person, hunting turkeys in the fall. And so I was really interested in them from that standpoint, but then, when I started doing field research involving turkeys, I became really fascinated with their behavior and how they function as a bird, and the rest is history—I’ve been studying turkeys ever since.
Pierre-Louis: You said you got really fascinated by their behavior. What are some of the fascinating things that they do that, you know, maybe most people don’t know about or don’t even really think about?
Chamberlain: Turkeys have a really complex social system. So when you see a group of turkeys—let’s say there are 10 …
Pierre-Louis: Mm-hmm.
Chamberlain: There’s a very structured order to those 10 birds: there’s a dominant bird, and then there’s a No. 2 bird and a No. 3 bird and a No. 4 bird, and so on and so forth. So those are called dominance hierarchies. And that group of birds, their entire lives are dictated by that dominance structure.
And so that’s why you constantly see turkeys kind of bickering with each other, they’re chasing one another, because they’re constantly testing those dominance hierarchies. And I think a lot of people don’t realize how structured a turkey’s life is, from—literally, from the day they hatch. They’re constantly trying to one up each other and become the dominant bird.
Pierre-Louis: Are there perks to being the dominant bird?
Chamberlain: For sure. There’s preferred access to foraging resources, so the dominant birds are going to—are going to, basically, push off subordinate birds and access food. The dominant birds are going to breed first and more often. So if you’re a male and you’re dominant, you’re going to breed with more females than a subordinate bird.
And if you’re a female, you’re going to reproduce first, you’re going to nest first because you’re the dominant bird, and there’s perks to that because the early bird gets the worm, so to speak. In the turkey world, if you produce a nest early, you’re much more likely to be successful. And if you are successful, your poults, which are the young turkeys that hatch, they’re much more likely to survive if they’re hatched earlier.
So there are definitely perks to being dominant.
Pierre-Louis: So I used to live in the Boston area for a while, and in that area wild turkeys are kind of famously menaces, you know? You see them, like, on the street [Laughs] …
Chamberlain: [Laughs.] Yeah.
Pierre-Louis: Attacking the city bus, holding up traffic. But there was a time when turkeys, despite being from North America, weren’t quite so ubiquitous. Can you talk a little bit about the bird’s decline and then their resurgence?
Chamberlain: So basically, turkeys have gone through this kind of full-circle recovery, if you will. So as the U.S. continent was settled, colonization occurred, turkey populations were really decimated by overharvest—in many ways, for subsistence, right? I mean, humans were trying to put food on the table. And at the same time, we were clear-cutting a lot of the eastern forest of North America as colonization was occurring. And so you saw turkey populations really plummet until around the 1950s and ’60s.
At that point you saw a shift where conservationists, wildlife agencies, nonprofits, they started focusing attention on restoring wild turkeys to their former, you know, range, and so what you saw was the trap and transfer of wild birds. Basically, people like me went into remaining populations of turkeys, we used nets to capture those wild birds, and then we translocated them to places where they had been extirpated, and turkey populations exploded in the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s.
And now what you’ve kind of seen is a lot of populations, particularly in the Southeast and the Midwest, have declined over the last few decades, and, and there’s a lot of reasons for that, and those reasons are quite complex, which is why I have a job.
They include everything from habitat loss to habitat degradation and fragmentation. We know there are disease issues with turkeys that are very complex. Predator populations, things that eat turkeys and their eggs, appear to be at apex levels now. Predators like coyotes and bobcats, and raccoons, birds of prey, that were persecuted many decades ago, those populations have flourished now.
And so the factors that are influencing turkey populations are very different now than they were 40 or 50 years ago, and we’ve seen predictable declines because of that.
Pierre-Louis: I was reading something where—I think it was Massachusetts, in the 1950s, said that the bird was functionally extinct in the state at that point …
Chamberlain: Uh-huh. That’s right.
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