Have a Great Thanksgiving!

 

Here's to a fun week of preparations for the feast. Some of New Jersey's wild turkeys, above, are slipping quietly into the woods. They can disappear remarkably fast for such big birds.

But this guy... a member of the flock that lives in my little suburban town, was showing off during breeding season last year. They look different when they want to be seen. Click to enlarge.

Happy Thanksgiving!

 

One of our neighborhood turkeys. Click to enlarge.

 

November  

by Clyde Watson

November comes and November goes. 

With the last red berries and the first white snows.

With night coming early and dawn coming late. 

And ice in the bucket and frost on the gate.

The fires burn and the kettles sing.

The earth sinks to rest until next spring. 

 

Wishing you all another year filled with things to be thankful for! 

More Turkey Appreciation

 

I know I just wrote a blog about wild turkeys last week, noting their colorful heads. But they came back and this time on a sunny day that showed off their iridescent feathers. Turns out the turkey is not just a big brown bird with a flashy head. 

It's a walking rainbow!

Some details. Click to enlarge.

Feathers like burnished metal scales.

Copper, gold, and bronze.

Impressive!

Wild Turkeys

Wild turkeys have been passing through my yard lately. Males are primed for breeding season. This one kept spreading his tail, puffing up his feathers, and strutting. And what female turkey could resist that red, white, and blue skin head? 

 

Striking the classic turkey pose.

Then there's this guy who seems to be still growing into his head gear. Click to enlarge.

Some turkey facial ornaments have names. That's a snood dangling over the the beak, red wattles under the chin, and various other head bumps are called caruncles. Get a load of the snood on this guy. And the wattles. And the caruncles.

Looking good, turkeys!

Have A Safe Thanksgiving!

The wild turkeys above saw me looking at them and headed into the woods. 

 

Because of the CDC's warning about the high threat of Covid-19 right now, I'll be celebrating this year's Thanksgiving at home with my household only. As they say, we'll stay apart for now so we can all be together in the future. Click to enlarge.

This is how a turkey looks in a surgical mask.

I used to wish I could be in the country so I could see wild turkeys. Now they've expanded into suburban New Jersy and are walking on the sidewalks of my town, where I took this picture. It's proof that sometimes good things happen. Happy Thanksgiving to all! 

Flowers and A Turkey

I went for a walk on Saturday to look for signs of spring. It was too easy! There are flowers blooming like crazy out there.

So many colors of crocus. Click to enlarge.

Then I turned a corner and saw this...

A turkey! A big tom turkey all puffed up and ready to breed! He was gobbling and strutting like he was the king of all the turkeys. I was as impressed as I was surprised.

I've seen turkeys in New Jersey before, where they are becoming common, and I've written a couple of blogs about them (click here for one, here for another). But I usually spot them out of breeding season when they large but not too flashy, like in the photo above. 

But this guy was dressed to kill! Here's his other side.

Here's his amazing head. The turkey sighting drove all my thoughts of spring flowers right out of mind and turned this into a turkey blog. You have just been turkey bombed!
Happy Spring!

Holidays

The holidays have started. I hope your Halloween and Thanksgiving were as nice as mine. 

Here's a thought about holidays from Fred Rogers:

"I like to compare the holiday season with the way a child listens to a favorite story. The pleasure is in the familiar way the story begins, the anticipation of familiar turns it takes, the familiar moments of suspense, and the familiar climax and ending."

Winter is coming! Get the egg nog ready! 

Thanksgiving 2016

As a great Thanksgiving weekend comes to a close, a few of New Jersey's wild turkeys see me watching them and mill about nervously. 

And then slip away quietly into the trees. Happy Thanksgiving! Click to enlarge. 

Happy Thanksgiving!

These New Jersey wild turkeys got nervous when they noticed me approaching. Click to enlarge.  

They slipped away into the trees and quietly disappeared. Stealthy! 

Thanksgiving 2014

As the Thanksgiving festivities draw to a close, consider the wild turkeys  of New Jersey, a few of which are pictured above. Wild turkeys had been extirpated in New Jersey by the mid-1800s. In the 1970s a few birds were reintroduced. That population caught on, and wildlife managers captured and released them more broadly around the state. Now, about 40 years later, turkeys are a common sight all over New Jersey. Too common a sight, some say; there are thought to be about 23,000 of them out there! Click to enlarge. 

This looks like a lovely autumn lake in the country, doesn't it? Nope. It is in Prospect Park in Brooklyn -- about as urban as a place can be. The designers did a great job of creating an illusion of remoteness, didn't they? There's no population of wild turkeys here yet, but you can see one big old male wild turkey in the Prospect Park Zoo. 

Wishing you all another year filled with things to be thankful for! 

Turkeys!

The wild turkeys of New Jersey, Meleagris gallopavo. 

Slipping into the woods. Happy Thanksgiving! Click to enlarge. 

The Wild Turkey, Meleagris gallopavo

As unlikely as it may now seem to residents of New Jersey, there were no wild turkeys in that state from the mid-1800s until the mid-1900s. The historically abundant birds were extirpated (locally extinct).  Now there are over 20,000 in New Jersey and they seem to be everywhere.

In the 1950s some colonization by wild turkeys from Pennsylvania may have occurred. In 1977 the wildlife division of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection released 22 wild turkeys. The birds did well enough that in 1979, game managers were able to trap some of the flock and release them in different locations. The reintroduction program worked splendidly.

I just spent a week in southern New Jersey in the pinelands area around the Wharton Tract. I saw flocks of wild turkeys everywhere! They were by the sides of roads, in backyards, in the woods, in empty lots, and walking among the spring crops.

And wild turkeys are not just in the remote parts of the state; they're strutting in Newark's North Ward, Cherry Hill, Tenafly, Maple Shade, and more New Jersey towns and cities than there is room to list. A flock of about 200 birds was seen in Deptford last winter.

Closer to my New York City home, a famous female wild turkey has lived for a few years in Battery Park at the lower tip of Manhattan. Our urban turkey is named Zelda after F. Scott Fitzgerald's wife who is said to have once wandered from her home and been found, like the turkey, far from her normal habitat.