Thanksgiving is quickly approaching, and with it comes the thought of…turkey, of course!
But why is that? History indicates that an original Thanksgiving feast was indeed held by the Pilgrims and Wampanoag people at Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1621. However, there are conflicting accounts regarding which bird was served — with duck or goose perhaps more likely.
Many credit the marriage of Thanksgiving and the turkey to Sarah Josepha Hale, dubbed the “Godmother of Thanksgiving.” In the 1827 novel Northwood, Hale described a traditional New England Thanksgiving with special emphasis placed on the turkey. She later campaigned to establish Thanksgiving as a national holiday, an effort that culminated in Abraham Lincoln using his presidential powers to do just that in 1863.
In the time since, Thanksgiving and its turkey dinner have become an increasingly prominent marker on the American calendar. The turkey is the only North American bird that has achieved worldwide prominence for domestication; here in the States, the U.S. Department of Agriculture states that the value of turkey production was $6.57 billion in 2023.
Many of us will enjoy one of these domestic-type turkeys on Thanksgiving, but out our back doors another story is playing out. Wild Turkey has seen an interesting history, both throughout its range and here at home. Upon the arrival of Europeans to the eastern United States, the continent’s turkey population was estimated to number at least ten million birds. Densities steadily declined in most regions over the next 200 years, owing to large-scale habitat changes and overharvesting.
The Wild Turkey was extirpated from the Garden State, and many other states, by the 1840s. There is no mention of credible sightings in Witmer Stone’s 1937 classic “Bird Studies at Old Cape May”, yet he states, “Wild Turkeys at one time inhabited Cape May County, as well as other parts of New Jersey; we have abundant evidence in the accounts of the early settlers and explorers but they came to be regarded so much as a matter of course that we have no detailed account of them….”
Happily, reintroduction projects have been wildly successful in many places, including locally. One such effort brought Wild Turkeys to Belleplain State Forest in 1980, part of a larger flock reintroduced to Cumberland County. By 1993, in the landmark publication “The Birds of Cape May”, David Sibley considered the species a “scarce resident…county population numbers less than 100, at a density of at most one bird per square mile.”
Gains from those initial efforts in the late 1970s and early 1980s accelerated during the first part of the 21st century and today it is not unusual to encounter Wild Turkey in upland portions of the Cape May Peninsula, with larger flocks occasionally stopping traffic as they nervously dart and charge across roadways.
The New Jersey Division of Fish & Wildlife estimates that the Garden State’s turkey population is currently in the ballpark of about 20,000. This American icon is back in a big way – and that’s something we can all be thankful for Nov. 28.
