Superfact 20: Domesticated Turkeys and Wild Turkeys are the same species, but Wild Turkeys can fly. So yes, there are flying turkeys.
I think this is a super-fact, because the Turkey is a very important bird to Americans and at the same time a lot of people, including Americans, do not know that Turkeys are not flightless birds.
Domesticated turkeys are flightless but wild turkeys are not flightless. Wild turkeys can fly distances of more than a mile, sometimes at speeds of 55 miles per hour. I’ve seen it with my own eyes on turkey hunts. I’ve seen turkeys fly and glide across the sky at the height of 30-50 feet. I’ve seen them flap their wings and then take off.
The photo above is a Tom, a male turkey, that my oldest son shot when he was 11 years old. Male turkeys are called Toms and females hens. We took it to a taxidermist for preservation and mounting. I should add that we typically ate the meat of everything we shot. Taking a wild turkey to the taxidermist makes eating the animal more complicated but you can typically ask for the breast meat of the turkey.
Personally, I think that legal hunting is a lot more humane than eating meat from animals from factory farms.
I should add that legal hunting is often encouraged for conservation and population management. For example, moose are hunted in Sweden (my native country) to manage their large population (400,000 moose), which can cause damage to forests and agriculture, as well as starvation among moose, if not managed. Illegal hunting, on the other hand, is something nefarious. Below is a video showing wild turkeys flying (video is about one minute long).
I wish everyone a very happy Thanksgiving
To see the other Super Facts click here
Newstrade
Hi Thomas, I support legal hunting here too (although I don’t like it). It is necessary to control the antelope populations. I do not support trophy hunting of any sort of animal or canned hunting which is completely horrendous. I am moving towards vegetarianism again now that my family are older.
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Yes canned hunting is not sport. We are also trying to eat less meat as it is not good for lots of reasons. We are going to eat turkey though.
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Yes, I think turkeys and chickens are plentiful enough and they don’t do as much environmental damage as red meat does.
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Yes you are right. Red meat does a lot of environmental damage and is not healthy. We try to avoid it.
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Like me, you do small things to try to help to climate change crisis. Hopefully, these small things all add up.
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Yes I believe you are right. The “all of the above” approach, a little bit of everything can be more impactful that going all out with just one thing. Reducing red meat by 90% matters a lot more than the last 10%. Avoiding unnecessary driving, driving a hybrid, having one car instead of two, can do more to reduce emissions than buying and driving two EVs.
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They are big and bulky. I can see how some would think they couldn’t fly. Then there is the ostrich…
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Yes I’ve come across a lot of people who insist that there is no such thing as flying turkeys. It just surprises some people.
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I think I knew that wild turkeys fly, but didn’t realize they could fly so far! Happy Thanksgiving!
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I was pretty the impressed the first time I saw it. Big birds with large wingspans flying and flapping their wings above the tree tops. Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family.
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🙂
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We had wild turkeys on our property back in New York and those guys could absolutely fly. We startled a flock of them once on a walk with our dogs and they took to the trees en masse, which was quite a sight, not to mention a ruckus. (It is not at all easy to sneak up on a wild turkey. Some people may think turkeys are stupid things that stare up at the sky during rainstorms with their mouths agape and thus drown, but that is far from the case.)
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Yes you are right. They fly well and they are not stupid. Getting a turkey as my son did above was not easy. On another occasion we tried to sneak up on turkeys using bow and arrow. We were super quiet but it didn’t work.
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Java Bean: “Ayyy, I think we have got those here! Except ours are turkey vultures …”
Chaplin: “NOT the same thing.”
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Ha ha, Chaplin is right. Turkey vultures may look a bit like turkeys but I would not serve a turkey vulture on the Thanksgiving table.
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These turkeys are beautiful, especially the flying one. So much power to lift that massive body.
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I agree they are beautiful and it is amazing how they get their fairly heavy bodies up in the air. Male wild turkeys weigh between 11 to 24 pounds or 5 to 11 kilograms. I read that an Andean Condor can weigh up to 15 kilograms (California Condor the same as a Turkey).
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