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Thursday, November 22, 2001

By Don Hopey, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

If someone shouts out "Hey, turkey," don't automatically assume it's a putdown.

	A wild turkey flaps its wings in a front yard on Avon Drive in Mount Lebanon. (Tony Tye, Post-Gazette)

It could be somebody calling attention to the big, bronze-colored bird that has rebounded so well from near extirpation in Pennsylvania that it has become increasingly common, not only in the state's woods and fields, but also in city neighborhoods and suburban subdivisions.

Wild turkeys -- known scientifically as Meleagris gallopavo -- are now regularly seen in flocks of a dozen or more along Bigelow Boulevard, on Brucewood Drive in Mt. Lebanon and in the Allegheny Cemetery, from where they sometimes stray onto nearby Stanton Avenue, blocking traffic as they strut into Morningside.

Then there's the rafter of 13 birds that on most days can be found scratching and pecking on the lawn outside John McMillan Presbyterian Church on Clifton Road in Bethel Park and in the nearby neighborhood. The turkeys "travel in in a big circle around the houses and the church," said Shirley Lander, 53, a receptionist at the church who grew up on a farm and remembers turkey in the straw and cornfields.

Wild turkey populations have soared in Pennsylvania to an estimated 320,000 birds, up from 60,000 in 1968 and just a few thousand in 1900. During the fall turkey season that ended earlier this month, hunters around the state bagged somewhere between 45,000 and 50,000 birds, according the state Game Commission.

	Turkeys, by the numbers Turkeys are Pennsylvania's largest poultry-like game bird, related to grouse, quail, pheasants and chickens. Adult males, or gobblers, stand up to 3 feet tall and 4 feet long, and can weigh more than 25 pounds, although the average is 16 pounds. Females, or hens, are generally shorter by a third and weigh half as much. Plumage is an overall rich brown with tail feathers tipped with lighter chestnut brown. In shadows, turkeys appear black, but in bright sunlight their feathers gleam with copper, blue, green and mahogany highlights. Contrary to popular belief, turkeys can fly, and can do so for more than a mile at a speed of up to 55 mph. Each evening, turkeys fly into trees where they spend the night. A flock of six to 40 birds may spend the night in the same tree or adjacent trees. Turkeys also can swim, though they prefer to run if startled or in trouble. Their top running speed is estimated at 18 mph. They are predominantly vegetarians, with diets consisting of green vegetables, grass seed, leaves, roots and nuts, but younger birds also eat insects, amphibians, small reptiles and crustaceans. Hunting season for turkey in Pennsylvania is in the fall for varying lengths of time, at the end of October and beginning of November, and, since 1968, in the spring.

Wild turkeys have been on something of a roller-coaster ride since their brush with greatness 225 years ago, when Ben Franklin's proposal to anoint them the national bird lost out to the bald eagle by a beak.

Turkeys were abundant and widely distributed throughout North America when the first settlers arrived, and although the legend of the Pilgrims pulling apart a wishbone at the first Thanksgiving may or may not be true, the birds quickly became a reliable and important food source for the colonists.

The great kill-off of the 1800s

As the nation grew, woodlands were replaced by farmland and settlers continued to shoot so many turkeys for food that by 1800, market hunters were selling the birds for as little as six cents each, equal to about 60 cents in today's currency.

"They are becoming less numerous in every portion of the United States," observed naturalist John Audubon in the early 1800s, "even ... where they were very abundant 30 years ago."

Over the next century, with hunting pressure unabated, turkeys were whacked hard by widespread loss of habitat, the clear-cutting of most eastern hardwood forests.

Without all those trees to contend with, hunters had a field day and turkey populations plummeted. They were wiped out in the New England states and New York by the early 1850s, and absent throughout most of Pennsylvania through the last half of the 1800s, although bag limits for hunters remained at two a day. By 1900, only a few thousand wild turkeys remained in the rugged ridges and valleys of the state's south-central region.

Wild turkey populations began slowly growing again as the forest habitat started to regenerate.

The recovery was helped by regulations that limited and in some years banned turkey hunting. The state Game Commission even went so far in 1922 as to approve the purchase of 100 wild turkeys from Mexico for restocking, and in 1930 opened a turkey farm in Juniata County to breed, raise and restock the birds -- mostly with an eye toward providing more targets for hunters.

But even though the Game Commission operated turkey farms for another 50 years, they were an unqualified failure, producing genetically inferior, disease-ridden birds that could not establish self-sustaining populations and played little role in the bird's resurgence, said Jerry Wunz, a biologist who led the Game Commission's turkey program from 1959 until his retirement in 1989.

Playing a much larger role was the regrowth of the once denuded forests and the Game Commission's successful trap-and-transfer program. That effort moved birds from areas in which they were abundant to areas where they weren't and accelerated the turkey's natural expansion into the hardwood forests in the northern and western parts of the state.

Adapting to populated areas

During the 1960s, Game Commission field biologists started noticing turkeys in some unlikely habitats, around farms and near towns, and conducted experiments to determine how adaptable they were.

"We stuck some turkeys in Presque Isle State Park [on Lake Erie], which is small and gets a tremendous number of visitors," Wunz said. "We expected they wouldn't last but they surprised us. Despite the limited habitat and the people, they were able to live for 12 years in the park before they were eventually done in by predators and high water."

The Game Commission also experimented with stocking turkeys at Pymatuning State Park in Crawford County and at Beaver Run Reservoir in Westmoreland County. They did well at Pymatuning but eventually succumbed to hunting.

"At Beaver Run they did so well that we started trapping and transferring turkeys into more marginal areas," Wunz said. "We stocked them in Washington and Greene counties, where they were having a difficult time spreading."

The turkeys now seen in and around Pittsburgh are probably descendants of those birds transferred to Westmoreland, Washington and Greene counties, Wunz said.

Their presence in the state's more populated areas -- they now exist in every county except Philadelphia and Delaware -- has resulted in more hunters going afield for the birds and higher harvest numbers.

"We now know that turkeys are extremely adaptive to a lot of different habitats," Wunz said. "They're everywhere....

"Hunters know they've got turkeys in their counties now and they're hunting them where they couldn't before."