After almost disappearing, a large bird with a feathery swagger has bounced back in the US – and numbers are rising fast in some states.
A few years ago, I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where large wild birds roamed the streets. Around the same height as my daughter, they feared no man, nonchalantly wandering through heavy traffic, into people’s gardens, and across the campus of Harvard University.
It’s the same story elsewhere. A friend of mine – the journalist Bethany Brookshire – lives in Washington DC, and wrote last year about how the birds had been terrorising citizens there: some people had even been hospitalised. Another friend, who lives in Des Moines, told me the creatures had blocked traffic in front of a local school recently.
The bird in question is the wild turkey (Meleagris gallopavo), a species once all but eradicated in the US. And their return – despite all the pecking and bothering of passers-by – is something to be celebrated. “The restoration of wild turkeys is one of the greatest North American conservation stories,” writes Michael Chamberlain of the University of Georgia and colleagues in a recent US turkey “census”.
Read more at BBC.com
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