Let Us Give Thanks for Wild Turkey and Uncle Sam

Wild Turkey Feathers. This is a repost from Nov. 2008.

Let us give thanks to the Wild Turkey, America's largest ground-nesting bird.

Back when my grandfather was born, the Wild Turkey was teetering on the edge of extinction. Today we have more Wild Turkeys in America's woods than existed in pre-Columbian times.

How is that possible?

Good question. But before we get there, let's dwell a little bit longer on the miracle.

You see, it generally requires a lot of forest -- 2,000 acres or more -- to maintain the kind of food crop and cover that Wild Turkey need to thrive.

The reason for this is that in the dead of winter, Wild Turkey depend on acorns and other nuts and seed for survival. This food is only produced in abundance by mature hardwood trees -- oak, beech, dogwood, cherry and gum.

So what's the big deal? We have a lot of forest in America.

True enough now, but not as true a century ago in the Eastern U.S. and much of the Midwest. Back around 1900, virtually all the big stands of large trees had been logged out in the Eastern U.S. and across much of the Midwest as well. As the trees vanished, Wild Turkey populations plummeted.

Wild Turkey populations were further pushed to oblivion by rapid improvements in gun accuracy, and weak game laws that had yet to catch up to the changing dynamics of landscape and technology.

By 1910, there were fewer than 30,000 Wild Turkeys left in America.

Then, an amazing turnaround occurred. That turnaround started with passage of the Lacey Act in 1900. The Lacey Act ended commercial hunting of wild animals.

Commercial hunting is not sport or recreational hunting -- it is the opposite of that. In commercial hunting, the goal is not having a fun day in the field to fill your own freezer with wild meat, but a full year in the field to fill the freezers of 10,000 people whose primary concern is the price per pound.

To put it simply, commercial hunting is to sport hunting what gill-netting is to fly fishing. One comes with a factory ship attached; the other a simple wicker creel.

No single action has done more to improve the status of American wildlife than passage of the Lacey Act. Prior to its passage, commercial hunters bled the land white, shooting everything that moved. Wild game merchants sold pigeons for a penny apiece, and ducks for only a little more.

Hunters, using cannons loaded with shrapnel, would shoot 400 ducks in a day in Maryland's Eastern Shore marshes, while market deer hunters would set up bait stations near roads and shoot 20 deer in a night.

The Lacey Act helped put an end to this kind of unrestricted slaughter of American wildlife, but it did nothing to restore badly degraded habitat.

Wildlife without habitat is a zoo.

Habitat without wildlife is scenery.

America -- still a young nation -- remembered when it had both, and it wanted it all back.

The second steps on the road to wildlife recovery occurred between 1905 and 1911. It was during this period that Theodore Roosevelt set aside 42 million acres as National Forest and created an additional 53 National Wildlife Refuges as well.

It was also during this period that Congress passed the Weeks Act authorizing the U.S. government to buy up millions of acres of mountain land in the East that had been chopped clean of its forest in order to obtain wood for railroad ties, paper, firewood and timber.

With the Depression of the 1930s, and rapid migration of millions of people from the rural countryside to the city, more and more marginal farmland began to revert back to woody plots.

Spontaneous forest regeneration in Appalachia, along with tree-planting by the U.S. Government-funded Civilian Conservation Corps, helped restore more than 6 million acres of hardwood forests on denuded land purchased under the Weeks Act.

In 1937, the Wildlife Restoration Act (aka, the Pittman-Robertson Act) initiated a new tax on rifles, shotguns and ammunition, with this dedicated revenue going to help fund wildlife conservation.

Pittman-Robertson Act funds were used to purchase millions of acres of public hunting lands and to fund wildlife reintroduction efforts for Whitetail Deer, Canada Geese, Elk, Beaver, Wood Duck, Black Bear, and Wild Turkey.

In the case of Wild Turkey, initial restocking efforts were not successful. Turkey eggs were collected from wild birds, and the poults that were hatched were released into the wild. Unfortunately, these pen-raised birds were quickly decimated by predation and starvation.

New tactics were tried. A few adult Wild Turkeys were caught in wooden box traps intended for deer (picture of deer trap at right). These Wild Turkey were then moved to suitable habitat, but these adults birds also perished under the onslaught of predation.

The reintroduction of Wild Turkeys was beginning to look hopeless.

After World War II, game managers began to experiment again. This time, cannon nets -- large nets propelled by black powder rocket charges -- were used. These nets enveloped entire turkey flocks at once.

Moving an entire flock of Wild Turkeys seemed to work. The first few flocks that were relocated out of the Ozarks (the last stronghold of the Wild Turkey) began to thrive, in part because regrown forest provided more food stock for the birds to live on. The millions of acres of mountain land purchased in 1911 under the Weeks Act had, by now, become large stands of maturing hardwoods in the National Forest system.



Turkeys caught in a cannon net.

Systematic restocking of Wild Turkey continued through the 1950s and 60s,

With the creation of the National Wild Turkey Federation, more sportsmen and private land owners were recruited for habitat protection and Wild Turkey reintroduction.

Today, the range of the American Wild Turkey is more extensive than ever, and the total Wild Turkey population has climbed to 5.5 million birds.

Wild turkey hunting is now a billion-dollar-a-year industry, with 2.6 million hunters harvesting about 700,000 birds a year.

And so, when we are giving Thanksgiving this Thursday, let us remember not only the Wild Turkey and America's hunting heritage, but also such "big government" programs as the Weeks Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Pittman-Robertson Act, the National Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Clean Water Act.

Without Uncle Sam -- and your tax dollars -- much of America's wildlife would now be gone.

It was Uncle Sam -- and Mother Nature's natural fecundity -- that brought back the Wild Turkey, the Beaver, the Elk, the Whitetail Deer, the Black Bear, and the Bald Eagle. Ted Nugent and the National Rifle Association were nowhere to be seen, and neither were Bass Pro Shops or salesmen pushing Yamaha ATVs.

So next time you are in forest or field, remember Uncle Sam, and thank God for Mother Nature. Whether you know it or not, your hunting and fishing has always depended on both of them.


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A Turkey Made To Do the Job

It's my job, this Thanksgiving, to cook the turkey and to do the gravy, and I have been studying up for the task.

My bird is 22.5 pounds, is not frozen, and will be basted, and foil-hatted beginning very early Thursday morning. At a temperature of 325 degrees, it should take about 5 hours to cook the bird.

Since my mother has expressed some concern about my gravy-making abilities, I have carefully culled through the literature to learn a few tricks, and I have purchased a can of cream of chicken soup, two packages of turkey wings, and a small box of instant mashed potatoes as my "secret weapons" for success. We shall see if it is enough to overcome my natural culinary incompetence.

The modern Turkey was bred to be eaten -- it has no wild equivalent. To call it Meleagris gallopavo is an insult to the wild bird, which is both cunning and adaptive, and which can actually fly a bit.

The modern farm-bred bird, the so-called "Broad Breasted White," is a bio-engineered animal with an enormous body and breast, and it can barely waddle. 

In fact, my bird is to large that had it not met its timely end to serve my needs, it probably would have died on its own within a month or two due to the strain on its heart.    This is not a bird bred for health or longevity; it is a bird bred to die young, with a lot of meat on its bones.

Like most turkeys, my bird was almost certainly a product of artificial insemination due to the fact that farm turkeys, like English Bulldogs, are too big to reliably mate on their own. 

Yes, this is a real job; grabbing big Tom turkeys, flipping them over, and stroking their cloaca until a bite of semen is extruded and then aspirated up a vacuum straw afixed to the finger of the worker.  The reverse, of course, is done for female turkeys whose fertile eggs are then wisked off to waiting incubators.  A single insemination is good for a month of fertile eggs,

My bird was probably beak-trimmed within a day of its incubator hatching, and from birth to death it had a steady supply of good grain and clean water.   This is a turkey that never saw cold, flood, fox, coyote, raccoon, or bobcat. It never saw a parasite or a disease.  My turkey is a bird with a health plan, even if that health plan does come with a "death panel" at the end of its life.

The animal rights folks will tell you that farm-bred turkeys have a miserable life, but I am not sure I agree. Sure, they may have their beaks trimmed, but so do a lot of folks in Hollywood.  Funny how it's OK for humans to have nose jobs and tummy tucks, breast implants and face lifts, pierced nipples and tribal-art tattoos, but its a horror to trim a beak on a chicken or dock a tail on a dog. 

Of course, some folks will say my Turkey lived an "unnatural life" in a massive shed crowded with other Turkeys. Right. But what is a "natural" life for a turkey that is already so far removed from nature? Why am I supposed to feel bad that this bird, and all its incubator brethren, lived to a large size in a secure shed rather than died at the age of one or two-weeks, drowned by flood, or predated on by fox or hawk?  

My bird was born and raised at Plainville Farms in Pennsylvania and was raised on a pure vegetarian diet and without antibiotics. At a weight of 22.5 pounds at the end of its life,it had four or five square feet of room to move about in. No, that's not much. On the other hand, if people delivered me all the ice cream and steak I wanted, I might not venture too far from the couch myself.

To be clear, a turkey farm is not supposed to be Disney World; it's supposed to produce a fat and healthy bird as quickly as possible, and with a minimum of fuss and expense.  

My bird was bred for a purpose, and that purpose is in the oven right now.

There is a lot of talk these days about "Heritage Turkeys."  

A "Heritage Turkey" is nothing but a marketing scam.   This is failed farm stock being raised in a failed farm system, and the price you pay for maintaining this failure is somewhere between $7 and $10 a pound. 

I am not opposed to folks buying Heritage Turkey -- it's still a free country.  But let's be clear that what is being bought here is not meat; it's philosophy.  It's romance.  And in the end, what you get is a dead turkey, and a higher price, and a bird that, by most accounts, is not as tasty as a modern Broad Breasted White.   Is there a win in any of that?  If so, I cannot see it.
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Let's Talk Turkey, Sarah

Folks who know me personally might remember me going Super Nova (just a little bit) over the incredible ineptitude of the McCain-Palin Advance Team.

The Advance Team for McCain-Palin put John McCain against a green screen (making him look like cottage cheese on lettuce), and they put up pictures of tombstones at Arlington National Cemetery behind Mitt Romney while he endorsed John McCain and spoke about our impending "victory in Iraq" during the Republican National Convention.

My personal favorite moment was when John McCain was speaking at the Republican National Convention and they put up a picture of what appeared to be a huge mansion behind him.

What? Is that one of his four, five, seven houses? I certainly did not recognize the building. And how could I have? It turned out to be Walter Reed Junior High School in Beverly Hills, California -- not Walter Reed Army Hospital here in Washington, D.C.

Hey, when advancing a show to be seen by 50 million people, just throw anything up on the screen. Who cares?! Details are for ... Democrats.

So you will forgive me if I thought I had seen it all with team McCain-Palin.

Silly me!

The video, below, comes from a recent Sarah Palin interview.

Watch what is happening in the background. Now that's good Advance Work, eh?

Happy Thanksgiving!


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Nice Things to Find on the Farm

I live for small thrills in the woods. On Sunday we busted a female turkey from almost underneath our feet -- it exploded into the hedge, with the dogs chasing after it. We had been loud, so I thought a nest might be nearby, but I did not find it. Just as well.

Coming down the hedge we came across this nice box turtle, with nary a nick in the carapace. Nice! For a little about the decline of box turtles in the Eastern U.S. -- and why I consider this another canary in the coal mine, see >> Protecting Box Turtle Memories

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Coffee and Provocation

A Bucket of T-Rex Please:
The New York Times and other sources report that chickens are descended from T-Rex. Well actually, the truer story is that all birds are descended from dinosaurs. Hmmmm. So they didn't all die out with the meteor crash?

Are Breed Restrictions Code Talk?:
The Bluedogstate blog asks whether breed-specific bans, and pit bull bans in particular, are the new "code talk" for keeping blacks and poor folks down and out? In the era of Imus, that's not crazy talk, and there are some good points scored here. That said, I am not always thrilled by some of the numbskulls who own pit bulls. One can admit there is a problem without necessarily embracing the solutions offered by know-nothing politicians.

Manatees are Doing Well:
More evidence that the Endangered Species Act works: US Fish and Wildlife Service officials are considering reclassifying the manatee as threatened instead of endangered, a sign that the numbers are up a bit thanks to motorboat and development restrictions. And, yes, manatees will still be under Federal protection.

Bite Sized Snacks Released to Wild:
Twenty endangered Columbia Basin pygmy rabbits, Brachylagus idahoensis, were reintroduced to the wilds of Washington state just three weeks ago, but 14 of them have already been eaten by coyotes, hawks and owls. These little rabbits are the only burrowing rabbits in this hemisphere, weigh just 1 pound, and their wild population got so depleted a decade or so ago that they were all rounded up and put into a captive breeding program to ensure their survival. One has to wonder how retarded the scientists were to not do basic predator abatement at the reintroduction site.

Wired Monks Gone to the Dogs:
The Monks at the New Skete monastery are the stars of the new Animal Planet series "Divine Canine: With the Monks of New Skete" which premiers on Monday. I hope the brothers will explain why they stay away from AKC dogs and always import breeding stock. See Inbred Thinking on how the AKC's closed registry system wrecks dogs.

Wild and Working Dogs on PBS:
PBS channels will be showing "Dogs That Changed the World" on April 22 and 29. The series promises to offer a broad look at dogs and the human-dog relationship and features a round-robin of clips "from the jungle to the arctic" of dogs hunting, herding, guarding, pulling, and guiding. Again, we can only hope the series explores a little bit of the Inbred Thinking that undermines dogs today.

Animal Planet Plays Catch Up to Cesar Milan:
Animal Planet is trying to play catch up with Cesar Milan with their new series "It's Me or the Dog" where Briton Victoria Stillwell tries to sort out dysfunctional pets and people. The series starts Monday. Once again, it seems only people with accents can train American dogs and owners. Walkies anyone?

Wolf-Man, Dog-Man or Idiot?:
Once again we have a Briton, but this time it's Shaun Ellis who took in three abandoned wolf pups (from where?) and decided he was just the guy to raise them up in a big zoo-cage enclosure in order to teach them how to be a wolf. Apparently long hair and a disdain for a bath is all you need to do the job. It was all filmed for the National Geographic Channel series "A Man Among Wolves," and shot "on location" at the 25-acre (is that all?) Combe-Martin Wildlife and Dinosaur Park in Devon. Call of the wild indeed!

Spring Thanksgiving:
Spring turkey season starts this week in most places -- be careful out there. Meanwhile, let's give thanks for what the National Wild Turkey Federation has helped give us. .