Talking turkey
Part two: How they made it past the canal, and outwitted the feds
The first part of this series (How turkeys made it back) explores how turkeys were reintroduced to Massachusetts after being virtually extinct for more than a century. But their support team from the state Division of Fish and Wildlife had not yet tried to repopulate the Cape.
When intrepid Fish and Game biologists, led by Jim Cardoza, were ready to try to move turkeys back to the Cape, the logical location was a vast open area then called the Massachusetts Military Reservation, now Joint Base Cape Cod.
Thinking like a turkey, the northern part of the base was particularly appealing, with thousands of forested acres used for generations for weapons testing, still off-limits to civilians. Turkeys don’t step hard enough to explode old ordnance, but the danger offered protection.
Thinking like a human, it was attractive because the state owned the huge reservation; the biologists could navigate their own bureaucracy almost as well as the turkeys navigate terrain.
They got the go-ahead, trapped a flock in South Pittsfield, and crossed the canal on a freezing March day in 1989, five degrees above zero with a hard wind blowing. Six gobblers, 12 hens, were packed solo in padded wooden boxes destined for the “Impact Area,” where the latest generation of military masterminds wants to clear cut another 170 acres to make a machine gun firing range.
There, set down in a row, the cages were thrown open as F-15 fighters practiced “stop and gos” nearby. With a little prodding and many a whoosh, the birds vamoosed. The turkey experimenters stepped back and waited to see what might happen.
It didn’t take long to realize that those jakes and jennies were doing their best. Within one year, people were seeing birds at the Barnstable County Fairgrounds, miles from the release. Within a couple of years, people were seeing them in Yarmouth.
Knowing that turkeys could handle Cape reality, the state team turned to the next logical release site, yet farther east, maybe even more appealing; the expansive low forest of the Cape Cod National Seashore.
This time the bureaucracy was federal, so the state team had little clout. And despite entreaties, no one in the National Seashore would authorize a release of native birds that surely had been on that land for centuries — though not at the time the Seashore was created, in the 1960s.
Really?
Among the team was volunteer Chet Lay, a well-respected Cape Cod land surveyor who knows the quilt of ownership on the Outer Cape as well as anyone. He didn’t want to take no for an answer, and it didn’t take him long to figure out a strategy:
He locate a friend who owned a nice little parcel in the woods of Wellfleet, Ernie Harburg. Ernie didn’t have many financial worries because his father “Yip” Harburg had written the entire “Wizard of Oz” movie score (among other famous tunes), so the royalties kept coming. But from Chet’s perspective, something else mattered more:
Harburg’s private property abutted the National Seashore.
Sure, said Harburg, you’re more than welcome to release turkeys on my land, the Seashore can’t tell me otherwise. What’s more, no one is going to tell wild turkeys where to go — and no fence or force could stop them from heading into the vast open Park.
By March, 1995, the next release was ready to go.
Rocket nets did their job in the western part of the state, but only partly; there was a mishap, a cannon catapulted a cinderblock through a farmer’s barn, so only “girls” were captured. The team figured they wouldn’t waste the moment or money, so a dozen or so birds were crated and made the move, followed months later by another cluster that included “boys,” also freed on Harbury’s land.
Seashore reticence aside, some Park rangers showed up — and not only winked, but helped.
Chet Lay and others lobbied for yet another Cape drop, splitting the difference in his town of Brewster, but Jim Cardoza assured them that wouldn’t be necessary.
He was right.
Within a couple of years the military base flock and the National Seashore flock found each other, somewhere around Dennis and Harwich. The entire peninsula became turkey territory, and they prosper.
Out West, they talk about the return of elk, wolves, and buffalo as the greatest animal restoration successes of our time. But we should count another among them, with a nod to Ben Franklin; the return of the turkey.
Gobble gobble.
NEXT: WITH WCAI/NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO’S HELP, HEARING A VOICE.
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Hi all, and with apologies, reporting that Yip Harburg's name is with a 'g' at the end, not a 'y.' Even more personally galling is that I knew that, and typed it wrong anyway. Sigh ...