Gobble, Gobble - Time to Talk Turkey

Turkeys are omnivorous. This means they'll eat any type of food, plant or animal. While their main diet is seed, nuts and leaves, they also eat insects, and will take frogs, lizards, salamanders, and even crabs if they can catch them. Turkeys are a large bird, up to four feet long, with a four or five foot wingspan. This means they need a LOT of food. And when you consider that a brood of turkeys could have 18 chicks (though usually only 10-12) that's a LOT of bird to feed!

The chicks of turkeys are precocial. That means that they are ready to leave the nest shortly after they hatch, and can feed themselves. Within 48 hours of the eggs hatching the mother and chicks start wandering around together looking for food. The female then stops defending such a fixed territory, and starts directly defending her chicks.

This is an advantage over birds with altricial chicks (that have to stay in the nest for some long amount of time and have to be fed by one or both parents). Birds with altricial chicks take a chance that a predator will find them, since they're staying in one place.

To sum up, Wild Turkeys are an American bird, wary and intelligent, territorial when threatened, with chicks that can quickly fend for themselves. That wouldn't have been a bad symbol for a fledgling American nation, suddenly kicked out of its nest by revolution. Of course, I'm not sure we'd look forward to Thanksgiving as much if we had to eat eagle....

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