http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/knau/local-knau-869183.mp3
Flagstaff, AZ – Earthnotes: Turkeys
Celebrating the bounty of Earth with turkeys isn't a new custom on the Colorado Plateau. This big game bird, native to North America, has been an important staple of regional diets at least since the days of the Anasazi a thousand years ago.
The Anasazi kept turkeys in pens for food and used their feathers to make blankets. Turkeys probably also ate grasshoppers in cultivated fields of corn and beans.
In the eighteenth century, Ben Franklin suggested, perhaps in jest, that this tasty species should become the national bird. His candidate lost out to the bald eagle, but Euro-American settlers did love eating turkey -- so much so that turkeys were almost driven to extinction by overhunting.
Since the 1940s, reintroduction programs and stricter controls on hunting have returned turkeys to many of their former haunts in the Southwest and around the country. Their populations can swell quickly because turkey hens lay an average of eight to twelve eggs apiece, and their young can run and hide adeptly only a few hours after hatching.
Turkeys thrive in wooded places with a mix of dense cover for roosting and openings for feeding. In Arizona they like places where oak trees produce bumper crops of acorns.
Hunters like to track these wily birds, and naturalists like to hear male turkeys making their distinctive gobbling calls in springtime. Watch and listen for them in the woods -- and appreciate their distinctive American flavor at mealtime this Thanksgiving.
-Peter Friederici