lost creek times
t imes November 2014
News for the Residents of Lost Creek
Volume 7, Issue 11
Nature NOTES: Talking Turkey by Peter English Last month we talked about was actually the second big Mississippi Kites and their reintroduction of Turkeys in the amazing 5500 mile migration. US. Back in the 1500s and 1600s, It turns out that they are not explorers from Europe were alone in the hawk world with shipping all kinds of things back that tremendous migration. to home from the New World. Swainson’s Hawks are even more Among these were Turkeys from amazing, as they travel from as Mexico. The Europeans of the far north as Alaska to the plains time found the Turkeys to be of north-central Argentina delicious, and soon figured south of where the Mississippi out how to domesticate them. Kites end up stopping. All that When British settlers came to distance to spend Thanksgiving North America in the 1700s they in a place that has better weather brought domesticated Turkeys and better food than they would here with them. find if they stayed in North But the Turkeys the Europeans America with us. had domesticated were the Speaking of Thanksgiving Western US/Mexican subspecies, one of the iconic parts of the and it has white tips to the holiday revolves around a bird. feathers at the base of the tail Turkeys are native to North and the tail itself. The other America and are found in all four North American subspecies of the lower 48 states. In the that are found in most of the late 1800s and early 1900s, the US have brownish tips to the tail. The brown tail feathers indicate that this number of Turkeys dwindled as So the domesticated Turkeys the is a true wild turkey. people shot pretty much anything Europeans brought had white that moved in the wild. Passenger Pigeons and Carolina Parakeets feathers where the native turkeys had brown. As domesticated ended up going extinct from all the shooting, but Turkeys turkeys escaped and joined the local wild populations, bits of made it. Their wide distribution today is primarily the result of white started turning up in the tail feathers. To this day you reintroduction programs and rational hunting laws. can tell if a Wild Turkey has domesticated blood in it by the This round of reintroductions in the 1940s and onward color of its tail. Copyright Š 2014 Peel, Inc.
Lost Creek Times - November 2014
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