From ancient Greece to modern times, Thanksgiving is delicious: Wild turkeys, however, are downright mean

Wild turkey walking in grasslands

The origins of Thanksgiving can be traced back to ancient full moon harvest festivals. The Chinese held a harvest festival of Chung Ch’ui in celebration of the birthday of the moon. The Egyptians celebrated the full moon festival of Min with a procession, a great feast, music, dancing and sports. Grecean women observed the festival of Thesmophoria on the October full moon in honour of the goddess Demeter for the gift of grain. The Romans also commemorated their corn goddess Ceres with the full moon festival of Cerelia. The Norse and Anglo-Saxons held an end of summer festival on the first full moon of their lunar calendar, which featured harvest bounty, mead, ale and sacrificial beef. The Celts celebrated Samhain at summer’s end with bonfires and feasts of roast boar from the hunt, roast beef from the herds, nuts from the forest and breads made from harvest grains.

The Jewish festival of Sukkot is still celebrated with prayers, blessings and meals and lasts for seven days, starting on the night of the Blood Moon. And Native North Americans still celebrate three significant autumn moon festivals with feasting, music, dancing, storytelling and sacred fire: the Green Corn Festival, the Harvest Moon and the Feast of the Hunter’s Moon. Europeans also continue to celebrate thanksgiving into modern times with grand feasts prepared from wild game, domestic animals, and seasonal harvest crops, or whatever is on hand, and those who immigrated to the New World brought their traditions with them.

While local customs and seasons may have varied, festivals of thanks typically featured an abundance of food, with the possible exception of English explorer Martin Frobisher’s meagre meal of thanksgiving on Baffin Island in July 1578 for safe sailing over storm-tossed seas, which consisted of salt beef, biscuits and peas scrounged from the ship’s larder. Frobisher’s was a paltry pantry compared to the ample feast French navigator Samuel de Champlain and his crew of settlers held on Île Sainte-Croix in 1604 to celebrate their safe passage. The first thanksgiving festival held by the Pilgrims in Plymouth in October 1621 was also celebrated with an abundance of food. Coincidentally, both Champlain and the Pilgrims held communal feasts with their Indigenous neighbours – the French with the Miꞌkmaq and the English with the Wampanoag – featuring wild game, fresh fish and harvest produce.

The life of a pioneer was not easy. Many died of starvation trying to scratch a living out of New World soil. After a bleak winter on Île Sainte-Croix, the French settlers were moved to Port Royal, where Champlain established l’Ordre de Bon Temps, a social gathering that guaranteed a “laden banquet table” provided by a designated steward responsible for ensuring the success of the feast. The popularity of the order grew, and the rivalry among the hunters was so high that they started foraging days earlier to provide a menu of “ducks, bustards, grey and white geese, partridges, larks … moose, caribou, beaver, otter, bear, rabbits, wildcats … sturgeon,” which was served “together with fruits, vegetables, fresh bread, pastries and wine.”

While Champlain made no mention of turkeys being on the menu, he wrote about a marvelous bird described to him by the Mi’kmaq, which he rightly guessed was the wild turkey that inhabited the eastern half of North America. “They are as large as a bustard, which is a kind of goose, having the neck longer and twice as large as those with us,” Champlain wrote in his Voyages. “All these indications led us to conclude that they were turkeys.”

Champlain’s turkey should not be confused with the tamed Mexican turkey the Spaniards introduced to Europe in 1519; or the ones that navigator William Strickland purportedly brought back to England and adopted as the family crest in 1550; or with its descendant, the large, meaty domestic turkey that graces the family Thanksgiving table today. According to hunters, chefs and gourmands, while the wild turkeys our pioneer ancestors served on special occasions were not nearly as plump as the turkeys we buy from our local farmers, butchers and grocers, they were far tastier. For years, the wild turkey was the preferred fowl for special occasions in North America and might have become the national bird of the United States had Benjamin Franklin won his case against the bald eagle.

It may surprise those who have seen the flocks of long-necked wild turkeys strutting along steep forested roads and through the campsites of Saskatchewan’s Cypress Hills Park as though they own the place that these once-abundant birds were almost annihilated in the early 1900s by unregulated hunting, logging and farming. But while they’re smaller and scrawnier than domesticated turkeys, they’re hardy and adaptable and far more aggressive than their tamed cousins. And they can fly…really, really fast. Wild turkeys can fly as fast as 55 mph for short distances. They’re not so bad at running, either, managing speeds of 15-30 mph.

The Jolly Life exhibit at the North Battleford Western Development Museum features the life of an early farmstead wife and has on display one of the last seven wild turkeys in Saskatchewan, bred in St. Gregor in 1929. “Newcomers to the province hunted wild turkey for food,” the exhibit notes explain, “and cleared away the bird’s bush habitat for farm land.” By the early 1900s, wild turkeys were already a rare breed in Saskatchewan and everywhere else in North America. And although they could fly fast, they couldn’t fly far.

They also had poor depth perception and sense of smell and were not the brightest birds on the block, being easily trapped by the settlers and Indigenous peoples, who regarded them as a primary food source. As the pioneers cut down virgin forests in their push west, they also cleared away the natural habitat of wild turkeys. In the 1920s, the birds had dwindled to around 30,000, and were further devastated in the prairies by the drought of the 1930s. By the 1940s, they were nearly extirpated from Canada and were barely hanging on in remote areas of the United States.

With the regeneration of new woodlands, the introduction of new wildlife restoration laws, and the efforts of game officials to encourage the protection and breeding of the surviving wild turkeys, their numbers slowly began to increase. At first, however, the restoration of the wild population was hit and miss. Techniques like game-farm and pen-raised turkeys failed because the hens were improperly imprinted and had no experience surviving in the wild. With the advance of trapping techniques and the development of a rapidly propelled cannon net, wild turkey numbers increased. Thousands of the birds were captured or moved with drop nets and immobilizing drugs.

The reintroduction of wild turkeys to the continent, particularly the eastern variety, is one of the great North American conservation success stories. Today more than 7 million wild turkeys are roaming forested areas of Canada, the United States and Mexico. Hunters are literally flocking to Ontario, where a 2007 survey reported that between 80,000 and 100,000 wild turkeys were living in the province. Manitoba, Alberta and British Columbia are also popular provinces to go wild turkey hunting. Smaller populations live in southwest Alberta and southeast Saskatchewan, where the gregarious gobblers can be seen puffing up their breast feathers and spreading and shaking their magnificent tail feathers to attract the admiration of the hens.

In some areas, though, flocks of wild turkeys have been spreading into urban areas and becoming a nuisance. They’ve been digging up lawns and gardens, perching on cars and terrorizing pedestrians and motorists. John Brassard, a Barrie, Ontario city councillor, was attacked by a couple of the large birds while he was driving home. When he honked his horn, “they actually turned and came at my car, pecking at my grille,” Brassard said. “If you get out to shoo them away, they’ll chase you back into the car. Something has got to be done or somebody is going to be hurt.”

“They are really quite aggressive,” said Mayor Jeff Lehman. “Really, really aggressive.” Similarly, garden bloggers have reported wanton raids on their urban crops. Turkeys have big feet and can do a lot of damage in a short time while foraging for insects in lawns and flowerbeds. They will also gobble up any garden greens and berries in sight. Some folks have taken revenge by inviting the feathered pests to Thanksgiving dinner and have discovered the culinary delight of tender, juicy roasted wild turkey breast served with rich, dark pan gravy. Consider your strategy carefully as wild turkeys also have very sharp eye sight and their eyes are positioned on the sides of their head, which means they have monocular, periscopic vision and are near impossible to sneak up on. And be sure to check your local gun laws, as shooting wild birds with a rifle or a handgun is illegal in some states.

There’s no need to take such drastic measures in southwest Saskatchewan, though, where the province’s wild turkeys graciously confine themselves to the Cypress Hills and the area just past the bridge along the narrow winding road from Maple Creek. With Thanksgiving right round the corner, local butchers, farmers markets and supermarkets across North America are well-stocked with big, fat, blasé traditional domestic turkeys. And those of us hankering to try something new and different can put away the bows and arrows, the face paint and the gobble calls and order a wild turkey online. Our pioneering forebears undoubtedly would have done the same if they’d had the internet back in their day.

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The Gull Lake Advance, Oct. 2, 2012

Won Best Research Story award in the 2013 SWNA (Saskatchewan Weekly Newspaper Association) Better Newspapers Competition, sponsored by the University of Saskatchewan.