On the East End, the last Thursday in November isn\u2019t the only Turkey Day\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2014 try all 364 other days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u00a0Our local turkeys can become truly annoying if a number of them decide to kick back on your patio or porch. One way to keep them from roosting near your favorite chair, or strutting around the patio and interfering with the plants, is fencing, but that might not be too effective either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Even though these avian comedians world look clumsy, they can fly, so hopping a fence is no problem. When they take wing, they\u2019re as graceful as any bird, sometimes reaching speeds up to 50 miles an hour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On Shelter Island, animal control officer Jenny Zahler constantly advises residents to treat turkeys the same as any wildlife: Observe and enjoy, but don\u2019t interact unless absolutely necessary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you\u2019ve ever been close to a wild turkey (and what North Forker hasn\u2019t), the first impression is how magnificently ugly they are, with the heads of space aliens and those dangling red wattles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rare birds, they\u2019re most content being earthbound, strutting around with the couldn’t-care-less attitude of bored aristocrats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They can also transform themselves in a flash into completely different beings, flaring out their feathers and changing the color of their fleshy necks to blue, gray or, being an American species, red, white and blue. The toms preen like this when they\u2019re scared or angry or looking for love.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
MYSTERIOUS BEINGS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n How the birds got here in the first place is a mystery. The National Wild Turkey Federation has found there are about 7 million wild turkeys roosting in 49 states (Alaska is turkey-free), beginning to approach the numbers from before Columbus landed, when there were about 10 million of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the turn of the 20th century, it was a close call whether the wild turkey would survive. Hunting and loss of habitat were the factors decimating the American rafter. (Rafter is the correct term for a group of turkeys. At least that\u2019s according to James Lipton, author of \u201cAn Exaltation of Larks,\u201d and many ornithologists back him up. Lipton teased out the derivation of the term from a group of logs bound together to form a raft.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n An act of Congress saved the American turkey from extinction with the Wildlife Restoration Act passed in 1937, providing money for wildlife habitat enhancement programs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to the Department of Environmental Conservation, turkeys were reintroduced to New York from Pennsylvania in 1959 when about 1,400 birds were let loose in the wild.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At one time there were so many wild turkeys in New York that the state exported almost 700 of them to Vermont, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware and the Province of Ontario, helping to re-establish populations throughout the Northeast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n BORN IN THE U.S.A.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n They\u2019re called turkeys because of a British misunderstanding. Mario Pei, a Columbia University professor of Romance languages, has written that turkeys, though American born and bred, were imported to Britain after a stopover in the Middle East.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Brits called everything coming from that part of the world \u201cturkey,\u201d as in Persian carpets becoming \u201cturkey\u201d carpets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Their All-American status was famously enshrined by Ben Franklin, who wanted to make the turkey our national bird. It speaks volumes about Franklin\u2019s personality that he preferred the basically gentle but fiercely independent (even cranky) turkey to the predatory bald eagle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The eagle, Franklin wrote, \u201cis a bird of bad moral character; he does not get his living honestly \u2026 like those among men who live by sharping and robbing \u2026 he is generally poor, and often very lousy. Besides, he is a rank coward; the little king-bird, not bigger than a sparrow, attacks him boldly and drives him out of the district \u2026 For in truth, the turkey is in comparison a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America. Eagles have been found in all countries, but the turkey was peculiar to ours \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Peculiar might be the last word, when it comes to all things turkey.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On the East End, the last Thursday in November isn\u2019t the only Turkey Day\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2014 try all 364 other days. \u00a0Our local turkeys can become truly annoying if a number of them decide to kick back on your patio or porch. One way to keep them from roosting near your favorite chair, or strutting around the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1574,"featured_media":130254,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,1743],"tags":[],"coauthors":[17479],"class_list":["post-130252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-community","category-featured-story"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n