Okay, so I’m staring at a penful of these massive gobblers, and I can’t help but think about how aerodynamically absurd these creatures are. I mean, they look like huge butterballs (no pun intended), and their wingspan is hardly impressive. So how do they achieve enough lift to carrying themselves south for the winter? It just doesn’t seem possible.
Mind you, I don’t have any empirical evidence to back that up. I don’t have any experimental data. I don’t even have any back-of-the-envelope computations to show. Still, it’s hard to believe that they can achieve any manner of aerodynamic prowess.
I do know that despite the “butterball” connotation, these creatures are basically massive masses of muscle. Everyone knows how lean turkeys can be, and so their muscle-to-fat ratio is pretty high. Still, their limited wingspan is difficult to ignore, and they don’t seem to be very energetic about flapping their wings, either.
Are there any ornithologists here who can shed light on this topic?
P.S. Bailey is so hot.
Wild Turkeys are completely different creatures than the domestic variety, which has been bred to be fat and nearly flightless. But even Wild Turkeys don’t fly all that much. They do so mainly to escape when being directly pursued by predators, and to perch in trees at night for safety. Although they can fly strongly for short distances, they never fly very far. Wild Turkeys don’t migrate south for the winter - they stay put and forage for food by scratching through the snow.
Last year there was a little story in the NY times about a wild turkey being found on the balcony of an apartment on something like the 27th floor. That’s pretty high for a turkey and most people thought he must have been caught in a strong updraft to get that high.
I have about 20 or so wild turkeys wandering my property, and I can testify that they do indeed fly. They don’t fly much, but they will take off and fly a few hundred feet when the mood takes them (usually when I’m shooing them out of our fenced yard).
During mating season last year, the whole flock of them decided to roost in the redwood tree out front. An odd sight: a score of these big birds (I think it was the females, not sure) roosting a couple of stories up in the branches of a huge tree. Every so often one would let out a wierd mating call of some sort.
As Colibri and others have noted they are at least capable of flight but in my observation of them during more than a few hunts they prefer to adequately assess their surroundings beforehand so as to not put themselves in a situation where flight would be required and, should an unforseen danger arise, prefer to run quite ably from harm’s way.
Flight would appear to be usually reserved for the evening’s roost in a tree.
So if they dropped wild turkeys out of the helicopter, the birds would have been OK?
(I always mess up that quote, I think of it in the correct form and then remember that I always mess it up so I change it to the incorrect form :smack: )
I’ve seen a turkey or two avoid the grill of my automobile by flying up and over the car. I never knew the wild ones could fly until then and first time I saw I almost got into a wreck. After that I’ve seen one perched in a tree (in the back yard) about, oh, twenty-five or thirty feet up. I mean, it was really high up there.
While on vacation and fishing at a pond in Mississippi, I heard this Loud
Rumbling in the woods coming right towards me! I thought it woud be a
couple of deer when all of a sudden a couple of monstrous Turkeys took to
Flight to escape whatever scarred them and they flew right over me and the
pond…