Why Wild Turkeys Hate the Wild
William Bradford, looking out at Plymouth from the Mayflower in 1620, was struck by its potential. “This bay is an excellent place,” he later wrote, praising its “innumerable store of fowl.” By the next autumn, the new colonists had learned to harvest the “great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many.”
Soon they took too many. By 1672, hunters in Massachusetts had “destroyed the breed, so that ’tis very rare to meet with a wild turkie in the woods.” Turkeys held on in small, isolated patches of land that could not be profitably farmed. But by 1813, they were apparently extirpated from Connecticut; by 1842 from Vermont; and from New York by 1844.
In Massachusetts—land of the Pilgrim’s pride—one tenacious flock hid out on the aptly named Mount Tom for a while longer. at Yale in 1847, but they heard the distinctive calls of the toms for another decade. Then the woods fell silent for a hundred years.
