Thanksgiving’s Iconic Bird Is Thriving Again in the Wild

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  For Scientific American Science Quickly, I'm Kendra Pure-Lewis in for Rachel Kotlin.

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  For millions of Americans, Thanksgiving is simply not Thanksgiving without turkey.

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  The bird is native to North America.

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  And yet, by the middle of last century, the most likely place to find one was on the dinner table.

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  A combination of deforestation, agricultural expansion,

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  and overhunting almost brought America's favorite gobbler to the brink of extinction in the wild.

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  But these days, across the US, there are more than 6 million wild turkeys,

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  up from alone in the 1930s, that some observers estimated to be as few as roughly 30,000 birds.

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  Here to tell us more about the species conservation success story is Michael Chamberlain,

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  National Wild Turkey Federation Distinguished Professor at the University of Georgia.

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  Thanks for taking the time to chat with me today, Michael.

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  Glad to talk to you.

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  So I think when people think about charismatic critters, they think of bears or coyotes or wolves.

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  And if they think about birds at all, they might think of eagles and hawks.

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  They probably don't necessarily think of the turkey.

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  Why have you dedicated your career to sort of studying the humble gobbler?

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  Yeah, so.

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  I've got an opportunity in graduate school to kind of pick the research project that I was working on.

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  And one of the options was to work with wild turkeys.

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  And I grew up as a young person hunting turkeys in the fall.

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