Turkeys can swim—and other fun facts for Thanksgiving table talk

In the mid-1800s, the term “drumstick” entered popular use to
avoid the scandal of expressing desire for a bird’s lower leg.
Likewise, according^[1] to culinary historian
Mark Morton, “Prudery was also the impetus behind the adoption of
the terms ‘white meat’ and ‘dark meat,’ which arose in the 1870s as
euphemisms for the breast and legs.”

Look! Up in the sky! Wild turkeys can fly short distances at 40
to 50 miles an hour. (Domestic turkeys can’t, a factoid that was
used to great comedic effect in the famous Thanksgiving
episode^[2] of WKRP in
Cincinnati.) Wild turkeys can also run 12 miles an hour and,
completing the triathlon, they are actually adept swimmers. They
move through the water by tucking their wings in close, spreading
their tails, and kicking.

Granted, wild turkeys don’t swim often. As John James Audubon
wrote in
1831^[3], “I have been told by a
friend that a person residing in Philadelphia had a hearty laugh on
hearing that I had described the Wild Turkey as swimming for some
distance, when it had accidentally fallen into the water. But be
assured, kind reader, almost every species of land-bird is capable
of swimming on such occasions, and you may easily satisfy yourself
as to the accuracy of my statement by throwing a Turkey, a Common
Fowl, or any other bird into the water.” (Actually, please don’t do
that.)

Although the esteemed Founding Father once declared the wild
turkey to be more virtuous than the bald eagle, there’s scant
evidence that he preferred it as the national symbol of his new
country.

Franklin’s feathers got ruffled when, in 1783, he learned that
the Society of the Cincinnati—a group of officers under the command
of George Washington—wanted to establish a hereditary order of
merit, to be passed down from oldest son to oldest son. Franklin, a
fifth-generation youngest son, expressed disdain for the officers
and their aristocratic trappings, including their choice of the
eagle as the emblem for their badge.

In a letter to his daughter, Sarah Bache, he wrote, “For my own
part I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the
representative of our country. He is a bird of bad moral character.
He does not get his living honestly … For in truth, the turkey is
in comparison a much more respectable bird, and withal a true
original native of America.”

But did Franklin truly regret the eagle as the national symbol?
As author Elizabeth Gawthrop Riely writes^[4]
in the journal Gastronomica, “The sober historian must be
skeptical. After all, eight years earlier, in 1776, he himself had
served on the committee with Jefferson and Adams when the turkey
was not chosen, and at other instances Franklin used the eagle
rather than the turkey as an emblem. No other evidence in the vast
Franklin archive mentions his support of the turkey as national
bird.”

More likely Franklin, knowing that his lengthy letter would
probably be published in U.S. newspapers, singled out the eagle as
part of a larger cautionary tale against creating aristocratic
institutions.

The tradition of sending a Thanksgiving turkey to the White
House began during the administration of President Ulysses S.
Grant, who was gifted with a 34-pound bird by Rhode Island Senator
H.B. Anthony on behalf of turkey growers in his state.

However, Cornell University anthropologist Magnus
Fiskesjö writes^[5] that the formal custom
of pardoning a Thanksgiving turkey began in Alabama, “where the
ceremony was first invented in the 1940s as a governor’s ritual,”
before it was “exported to the capital.”

John F. Kennedy is sometimes credited with the first
presidential pardon of a turkey when he declared, "Let’s
keep him going." According to the White House
Historical Association^[6], “The formalities of
pardoning a turkey gelled by 1989, when George H. W. Bush, with
animal rights activists picketing nearby,
quipped,"’Reprieve,’ ‘keep him going,’ or ‘pardon’: It’s
all the same for the turkey, as long as he doesn’t end up on the
president’s holiday table.”

Turkeys produce several different distinct sounds^[7] beyond their famous
gobble (more of an ill-obble-obble-obble), which is uttered
to attract females and establish territory. Other “words” in the
turkey lexicon: a contact call that sounds like a yelp (keouk,
keouk, keouk), an alarm (putt), and a cluck that’s used
as an assembly note (kut).

While domesticated turkeys are regarded as docile dullards,
hunters across the centuries, including Theodore Roosevelt, have
deemed the bird’s feral brethren to be cunning adversaries.

“The wild turkey is, in every way, the king of American game
birds,” the future president wrote in
1893^[8]. “[It] really deserves a
place beside the deer; to kill a wary old gobbler with the
small-bore rifle, by fair still-hunting, is a triumph for the best
sportsman.”

Concerns that wild turkeys might become extinct peaked in the
early 20th century, when the U.S. government released dire
statistics on their declining numbers nationwide. “These are
diminishing so fast that 1920 will see the finish of the turkey
tribe unless the authorities take a hand,” declared an
editorial^[9] in the December 19,
1912, issue of the Aberdeen Herald.

Some sought to save the bird through a raise-and-release
program. “The experiment is being made in California, and also in
New York State, where the Game Breeders’ association (an
influential and wealthy organization of public spirited men), is
already raising wild turkeys on a considerable scale on its
breeding farms, some hundreds of the birds having been trapped in
Virginia and the Carolinas for this purpose,” reported the El
Paso Herald on November 25, 1911.

But the game-farm idea was a failure. "Turkeys that
were raised in those situations did not have the opportunity for
the hen to teach what predators would eat them,” explained^[10] James Earl Kennamer of
the National Wild Turkey
Federation^[11] in Edgefield, South
Carolina. “It was like taking a kid out of New York City and
putting him in the woods and saying, ‘Go hunt.’ They didn’t know
what to do."

The turning point came in 1951 when wildlife biologists in South
Carolina devised a method of capturing wild turkeys with a net shot
from a cannon—enabling the biologists to release them into habitats
where wild turkeys were scarce or nonexistent. By 1973 the wild
turkey population had rebounded^[12] to 1.5 million, and
today it numbers nearly seven million.