How turkeys made it back
Part one: We wiped them out for more than a century, and now …
With Thanksgiving leftovers still in the fridge, it’s a fine time to acknowledge that turkeys are everywhere, when just a few decades ago they were nowhere but in the oven.
They’re stopping traffic on back roads and Route 6, pecking through yards, bobbing their little heads with every gingerly step, way more wily than their demeanor suggests.
Ben Franklin wanted turkeys to be our national bird. He admired their native cunning as similar to the early American Minutemen, able to blend in, bob and weave, use the landscape to advantage. The bald eagle, on the other hand, is a vicious, scavenging bird of prey; what kind of national symbol is that?
The debate was serious enough that when the Massachusetts State House was built in the late 1700s, no one knew which way it would come down. So a sculptor carved a mythical bird to mount over the entrance to the Senate chamber, part turkey, part eagle, covering the bet. It’s still there, and people call it a “teagle.”
Cape Cod was the first place on the continent where Europeans “extirpated” turkeys, a fancy way of saying wiping them out but not quite to extinction. Small numbers survived in high, remote areas of upstate New York and rural Pennsylvania, far from human settlement.
That intrigued biologists enough to come up with ways to try to reintroduce them to Massachusetts. They reared birds in pens and let them go in wide-open areas around the Quabbin Reservoir, but domestic gobblers didn’t have the wiles to survive.
As early as the 1950s, people were fooling with ways to snare big groups of geese and other wild animals. They developed a technique using “rocket nets,” a Rube Goldberg extravaganza. “Hunters” would bait an open area with grain and corn to get turkeys coming. Meanwhile, they set up three or more small black-powder cannon in a row. Slowly they made the feeding area smaller, more concentrated. Come winter, a flock would rub shoulders to eat, now comfortable in the shadow of cannon barrels.
The biologists would then hit a button, igniting the cannon simultaneously. Projectiles flew, attached to a big net that fell over the turkeys, ideally snagging 12 to 15 at once. The scientists then would run out and throw a dark blanket over the whole scene to quiet them down – otherwise the turkeys would thrash around and hurt themselves, maybe escape.
The turkeys were then put in dark individual traveling crates, and transported to an inviting site to be released, together, to start a new immigrant community.
By 1972, the state Division of Fish and Wildlife was ready to try the first release of wild turkeys in Massachusetts. Officials in New York agreed to allow trapping some of a flock there. The Promised Land was the southern Berkshires, the state’s southwest corner, and when the rocket nets did their job, 37 animals became Massachusetts residents.
To say they did well is an understatement. Within a few years, scientists reported that the birds were spreading by as much as a 10-mile diameter every year. Turkeys were better suited to this brave new world than people thought; they didn’t need thousands of acres of forest to survive. They were more like deer; adaptable, moving east into more developed Central Massachusetts.
Soon there were enough Massachusetts wild ones to begin a trapping program without filching from New York. The state was divided into three sections, more turkeys shifted east, and they soon settled even among suburbia, so long as there were open swaths here and there.
But the Cape, farthest east, with a canal barrier, remained turkey-less until 1989.
The first to wipe them out would be the last to get them back.
NEXT, PART TWO: STEPPING OVER MUNITIONS, DODGING THE FEDS
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