northeast-flora-and-fauna

For Throwback Thursday - and Thanksgiving - I figured I should show a couple of the wild cousins of our Domestic Turkeys , Eastern Wild Turkeys . These 2 were selected because the pictures came out well. The 1st picture is 1 of the few pictures I've gotten of an male turkey (a tom) [1]. The prominent snood above his beak, the bright red wattle under the beak, the nearly-as-red caruncles next to the wattle, and the vicious-looking spur seen on the back of the forward leg all indicate this to be a male. (Males also have a beard, but I think the angle is wrong to see that.) June 4, 2017 at Duke Farms Photo 8423439, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC) A little more recently I saw this female turkey (hen). Though females do have snoods (you can see it if you look closely), wattles (you should be able to see it, though it's not as prominent as the 1 on the male above), caruncles (hard to see here, maybe because of the lighting), and a leg spur (I'm told it's th...

Here's a picture of one of the Duke Farms Wild Turkeys . I believe there are 4-5 flocks of these turkeys roaming around the property, which probably means some 15-40 turkeys that could potentially be found there. Yet most of the time you won't see 1 on a visit, mostly because they're pretty skilled at hiding/fleeing from people. (On this day I was lucky and saw more than 1 .) Since Wild Turkeys fly pretty well for short distances, the fencing around the Duke Farms core is nothing more than a minor inconvenience for them. I suspect the only time the fencing impacts their lives is when immature turkeys are with their mother, rendering the overall family earthbound until the kids can fly. Otherwise they no doubt move inside and outside the fence whenever it's convenient. Does this turkey look extremely serious to you? (That reminds me of my expression when a program isn't working, I know approximately where the bug is, but haven't quite figured it out.) August 31, ...

Last month I spotted a few Wild Turkeys foraging around Vista Lake at Duke Farms.  Taxonomically the Wild Turkey is grouped with the grouses , their closest relatives after the Ocellated Turkey . They're also in the pheasant family , so more distant relatives include partridges, chickens, peafowl, and quail.  Though the domesticated turkey is the same species as the ones you see in the wild, it had a somewhat circuitous route to get here. A different subspecies of our Eastern Wild Turkeys , the South Mexican Wild Turkey , was domesticated by the Aztecs. When Conquistadors conquered the Aztecs, they brought these Domestic Turkeys to Spain where they spread to Europe. Later settlers like the British then brought them back to the US. Somewhat oddly, the South Mexican Wild Turkey was one of the smallest subspecies of Wild Turkey, but after selective breeding the Domestic Turkey is actually much larger than any of the original Wild Turkey subspecies. (They're also considered much...