A couple of weeks ago I went to Coeur d’Alene for an uncle’s funeral. Since I’d only been there once, to cover a news story, I didn’t know my way around. So I reconnoitered the house when I got to the area around midnight. The house is in a rural area (my uncle built the house himself) up in some hills. As I rounded a curve on the winding 1-1/2 lane blacktop, I saw a pair of turkeys cross the road.
Could they have been domestic turkeys out for a midnight stroll? They were much leaner-looking than commercial turkeys I’ve seen. They looked like wild turkeys. But I’ve heard that wild turkeys don’t like to be seen, so I wonder if they really were.
Wild turkeys are a great comeback story. When I was a kid, you never saw them in these parts. Now they are quite common, and you often see them crossing a road, or browsing in open fields. My dad had a flock of turkeys that frequented his yard. (He put cracked corn out for them.)
Wild turkeys are now quite common in many parts of the US. They have even colonized at least one New York City park, Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx, where they are occasionally seen on the golf course.
They hide when scared, and they’re certainly pretty good at it when they want to. But when they’re feeling confident, they’ll sometimes trot out in the open. I saw a whole family (two adults and a half-dozen or so young) once at a Scout camp.
We have quite a few in western Missouri, too, and the further rural you get, the better chance you’ll have of seeing a few of them fly across the road.
We have a friend with land in central New Hampshire who gets visits from several garrulous wild turkeys every winter. They hang out about ten feet from her big picture window in the kitchen. They aren’t what I’d call shy – especially the males, who like to show off and shake that funky booty, sometimes even with no other turkeys in sight.
At least around these suburban parts (Bay Area in California) wild turkeys show no shyness at all. In fact they frequently cause cars to stop as they take their sweet time crossing the roads.
They’ve let me walk up to within feet of them without showing much fear and my cat once rode one for a few feet when she was able to jump on its back before it decided to flee (the cat didn’t seem to care that the bird was much huger than she).
I’m sure it’s just due to different standards of wildlife reporting in different states, but I find it amusing how the edges of the solid range coincide with non-geographic state borders.
I am an Urban dweller, in Saint Paul, Minnesota. A group of 12 or so lives a couple blocks south of me near the river. And I bike past a pair often in the morning on my way to work. Not very rural.
A couple months ago we were canoeing in central Michigan…we were quite surprised when a flock of them flew one by one from one bank to the next. We’ve spent a lot of time hiking around WI, IL, an MI, but have never before seen any turkeys.
And I have almost hit wild turkeys on my bike in Coeur d’Alene (well, not in town but just outside in the surrounding hills). They’re there.
Also some guy in town had been rehabilitating mountain quail and releasing them onto the hill in the middle of town, with mixed reactions (city had a little impact meeting and he got the ok, it seems). I don’t think they’re technically… autochtonous? native? ranging there? whatever the term is. But I don’t know if the abundant california quail are, either.
No kidding! Here’s a picture of said trukeys. I’ve seen a flock of twenty wander through my yard. I’ve also seen my cat try to stalk them across a mowed lawn. He’s got a lot to learn about stealth.
I’ve often wondered if I could just shoot them in my yard. I assume it has to be turkey hunting season, but yum. I hear wild turkey are mostly dark meat too. Again, yum.
That map is inaccurate (or at least incomplete). There is a pretty sizable wild turkey population where I am in Montana, which shows as white on that map.
You might want to be careful about that. A big wild tom turkey can kick the snot out of a domestic cat, and a whole flock of them could kill it.
In the Metrowest suburbs are extremely common. We have them in our yard and they thrive at my workplace campus. However, whitetail deer are even more common. They are usually in my yard when I get home from work.
