Field guide: Wild turkey
A Southern success story turns into a worrying scientific mystery (plus: a recipe from Jesse Griffith's The Turkey Book)
Growing up, “turkey season” for me meant November—that one meal where nearly everyone in the U.S. sits down to slice into a bird. But for those with a more intimate connection with our native turkeys—wild turkeys, or Meleagris gallopavo—the real season has just begun. The hunt is on.
The turkey is not on its face distinctly Southern; it is, after all, sometimes called “America’s bird,” since Ben Frank found it a more suitable national symbol than the bald eagle.1 True to form, wild turkeys can live in almost any kind of forest. But, as chef and hunter Jesse Griffiths notes in his newly released The Turkey Book, “modern turkey hunting history and lore started in the American southeast.”
First, though, before the modern era, there had to be the standard story of ecological tragedy. As white…
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