THE GOBBLING OF AMERICA

By John Skow

I WAS SPLITTING WOOD IN FRONT OF MY New Hampshire house, trying to get the chores done before the next wave of Republican cavalry swept through, when Frank, my neighbor, called to say that the turkeys were back. "Great," I answered."Tell them to stop wrecking Medicare, and nix on that tax cut for the rich."

"No, no," said Frank, "the wild turkeys."

"Buchanan? Phil Gramm?" But the truth is that my state, like much of the rest of the country, is overrun by wild turkeys these days, and not all of them are running for President. A quarter-century ago there weren't any wild turkeys here and only a handful elsewhere in the East. I had seen some in Missouri, on an outing with a clever fellow who made turkey calls out of condoms and bits of wire. But from Maine to Florida, and in most of the rest of the country, they had been shot out in the early 19th century. Now, as a result of state restoration programs, more than 4 million wild turkeys flourish around the U.S.

They are renowned as supernaturally difficult prey by the people who hunt them. Michael Tull, 41, a manufacturer's sales representative from Roswell, Georgia, calls the sport "absolutely addictive; some people call it a disease." He hunts about 25 mornings a year during the birds' spring mating season, getting up at 3 a.m., driving an hour and a half, then lying in the brush of north Georgia in a green-and-tan camouflage suit, making improper suggestions in hen-turkey language to persuade sex-crazed gobblers to strut into shotgun range, tail feathers spread, beard wiggling, wings spread and lowered. Generally, Tull says, he drives back to work happy but turkeyless. The range of a turkey flock is small, he explains, and the birds, which are quite intelligent, can spot anything out of place, like a sales rep in a camouflage suit.

Clearly there's some mythologizing going on here, because hunters manage to kill some 650,000 turkeys every year, but there's no question that turkeys, whose eyes bug out on each side of their head, have close to 360[-degree] vision, and their hearing is pretty good too. My Missouri friend was a bow hunter, which means he was more interested in hunting than eating. He said that you had to call a turkey to within 25 yards of where you were lying, camouflaged, with your bow at full draw, to have a chance of killing one with an arrow. This is not easy. Other bow hunters say 10 yards is the right distance, which makes turkey hunting about as doubtful a proposition as observing elves and fairies dancing in a forest ring.

But if dinner is what is on your mind, and you don't care about game laws, turkeys are dead easy. Just throw some corn on the ground. They will come. You will shoot them. That is what happened a century and a half ago, and turkeys were so unwily that by the end of the 19th century they were within a tick of extinction, with only about 30,000 birds hiding out in swamps and hollows across the continent. The 7,000 birds that now roam New Hampshire are the descendants of 25 individuals trapped in New York's mountains in 1975 and resettled. A similar program, begun in 1972 in the Berkshires, has given Massachusetts a thriving population of 10,000 turkeys. (The Butterballs in the Safeway freezers, incidentally, are descendants of a strain of wild Mexican turkeys domesticated by the Aztecs and taken by Spaniards to turkeyless Europe, then brought back to the New World. Wild turkeys taste pretty much the same--fewer chemicals, more satisfaction--but lack fat, so they profit from slathering with bacon.)

Like raccoons, wild turkeys are not really a wilderness animal. They are an edge-of-civilization critter. Deep snow and deep forest defeat them. They gobble insects in the warm months, occasionally in the median strips of rural interstate highways. But they get through winters, or don't, foraging for barberries, rose hips, wild apples, sumac, juniper, sedges and fern. What they really like is corn wastage at winter-bound dairy farms and sunflower seeds policed from beneath suburban bird feeders.

Our neighbors across Old Main Street, Carlton and Maggie, regularly throw corn on a big rock in their side yard, and last week the turkey flock they consider their own made its annual reappearance. There are 16 birds this year, hens and gobblers, milling about in an inch of new snow. A parked car doesn't bother them, but if you try to approach on foot, they sound their alarm call, "putt," or "putt-putt," and wander off into the woods in a not very alarmed fashion. Real alarm would send them running at about 25 m.p.h. or flying at up to 55 m.p.h., which they can do for several hundred yards at a stretch. It's clear that what they're doing in this familiar sanctuary, known to the older birds from last year, is merely setting the limits of polite socializing. As Al Pfitzmayer, a retired sheriff from Nassau County, New York, puts it,"To watch a turkey come in and hear the chatter, it's like a beautiful symphony. You don't even need to shoot them."