A turkey tail, a turkey feather and a turkey beard. Because of their large size, compact bones and long-standing popularity as a dinner item, turkeys have a better-known fossil record than most other birds.
The Burlington County Parks System held a Turkey Talk and Walk at Smith’s Woods in Eastampton on Nov. 25, just in time for Thanksgiving.
Attendees walked the trails and looked for wild turkeys, and learned about their behaviors, biology and reintroduction into New Jersey. The event was led by park naturalist Gina DiMaio, who likes to plan the county’s nature programs based on the time of year. That includes holidays, not just what’s going on in nature seasonally.
DiMaio touched on three main topics about the November bird: conservation, their biology; life history; and their characteristics; as well as their cultural significance.
“It was also fitting because November is Native American Heritage Month, so I wanted to touch on what turkeys meant to our Indigenous peoples because they were the first to domestic them (turkeys),” she explained. “They were a valuable food source for them, and then how that translated to when the European settlers arrived in the area.”
In the early 1500s, European explorers brought home wild turkeys from Mexico, where Native people had domesticated them centuries earlier, according to allaboutbirds.org. As wild turkey numbers dwindled through the early 20th century, people began to look for ways to reintroduce the valuable game bird.
In the 1940s people began catching wild birds and transporting them to other areas. Such transplantations allowed wild turkeys to spread to all the lower 48 states (plus Hawaii) and parts of southern Canada. Because of their large size, compact bones and long-standing popularity as a dinner item, turkeys have a better-known fossil record than most other birds.
“They’re very stocky, DiMaio noted. “They’re up to 20 to 25 pounds of weight for some of the heaviest ones and they are ground dwellers, so they have really heavy feet with three toes in the front and a little toe spur in the back. Their wings are rounded…
“Even though they have a wingspan of up to 5 feet,” she added, “they (have) a rounded wing shape that does not make for a very good, sustained flight, so they can only fly in short spurts. But they’re very social birds. They congregate in groups; they’re very vocal, so they have a variety of vocalizations to communicate with one another.”
The Turkey Talk and Walk is just one of the county’s many winter nature programs. Others are the Moonlit Trail Walk Series at the Boundary Creek Natural Resource Area on Thursday, Dec. 12; Winter Bird Counts (locations vary) on from Friday, Dec. 13 to Thursday, Dec. 19; Winter Tree ID at Smith’s Woods on Saturday, Dec. 14; and a Solstice Walk at Long Bridge Park on Friday, Dec. 20.
For more information, visit www.co.burlington.nj.us/235/Parks.
