1. Hey, let’s talk turkey. Not the overcooked, flavorless fowl on your plate tomorrow, but the wild birds that once roamed freely—because they’ve got something important to teach us: theatlantic.com/science/archiv…
2. When the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth, William Bradford saw a "hidious and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men.” But it had a silver lining, its "great store of wild turkeys."
3. That didn’t last. Turkeys were ruthlessly hunted; forests were turned to farmland. The last Tom in Massachusetts was bagged in 1847. Domesticated fowl were re-imported from Europe and farmed. But the iconic wild birds had vanished from the Bay State.
4. But the state industrialized, and the farms were abandoned. Today, 60 percent of Massachusetts is forest. Conservationists reintroduced wild birds, hoping to restore the pristine, unspoilt woodlands of pre-Colombian civilization.
5. The birds had other ideas. "Turkeys thrive close to humans in suburban and urban areas,” a state fact-sheet warns. There are more than 25,000 in Massachusetts, and they’ve become city pests. They’re like beautiful, large, aggressive pigeons. Police blotters are full of calls.
6. The conservationists, it turns out, had made the same error as Bradford—looking around, and seeing a bright dividing line between the wilds and civilization. But that’s not how environments work: theatlantic.com/science/archiv…
7. Where Bradford saw a desolate wilderness, native peoples saw a carefully cultivated, productive landscape—laboriously tended to encourage the abundance of fowl Bradford noted. People and turkeys lived and thrived side-by-side. theatlantic.com/science/archiv…
8. America’s urban spaces are filling with creatures—squirrels, deer, coyotes—once thought of as incompatible with dense settlement. This is the turkeys lesson. There is no bright dividing line between wilderness and civilization, and there never was. theatlantic.com/science/archiv…
