CONCORD, N.H. \u2014 No one wants a weasel on their Thanksgiving table, but swapping turkeys for other animals was once surprisingly common.<\/p>\n
Trading turkeys \u2013 for wildlife management, not dinner \u2013 was a key part of one of North America\u2019s biggest conservation success stories. After dwindling to a few thousand birds in the late 1880s, the wild turkey population has grown to about 7 million birds in 49 states, plus more in Canada and Mexico, according to the National Wild Turkey Federation.<\/p>\n
In many cases, restoration relied on trades. The exchange rates varied, but Oklahoma once swapped walleye and prairie chickens for turkeys from Arkansas and Missouri. Colorado traded mountain goats for turkeys from Idaho. The Canadian province of Ontario ended up with 274 turkeys from New York, New Jersey, Vermont, Michigan, Missouri, and Iowa in exchange for moose, river otters, and partridge.<\/p>\n
\u201cWildlife biologists don\u2019t suffer from a lack of creativity,\u201d said Patt Dorsey, director of conservation for the National Wild Turkey Federation\u2019s western region.<\/p>\n
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West Virginia, in particular, appears to have had an abundance of turkeys to share. In 1969, it sent 26 turkeys to New Hampshire in exchange for 25 fishers, a member of the weasel family once prized for its pelt. Later trades involved otters and bobwhite quail.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey were like our currency for all our wildlife that we restored,\u201d said Holly Morris, furbearer and small game project leader at the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources. \u201cIt\u2019s just a way to help out other agencies. We\u2019re all in the same mission.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wild turkeys were abundant across the United States until the mid-1800s, when the clearing of forestland and unregulated hunting led the population to plummet. Early restoration efforts in the 1940s and 50s involved raising turkeys on farms, but that didn\u2019t work well, Dorsey said.<\/p>\n
\u201cTurkeys that had been raised in a pen didn\u2019t do very well in the wild,\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s when we started capturing them out of the wild and moving them around to other places to restore their population, and they really took off.\u201d<\/p>\n
In New Hampshire, wild turkeys hadn\u2019t been seen for more than 100 years when the state got the West Virginia flock. Though those birds quickly succumbed to a harsh winter, another flock sent from New York in 1975 fared better. With careful management that included moving birds around the state dozens of times over the ensuing decades, the population has grown to roughly 40,000 birds, said Dan Ellingwood, a biologist with the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department. That\u2019s likely well beyond the expectations at the time of reintroduction, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cTurkeys are incredibly adaptive,\u201d he said. \u201cWinter severity has changed, the landscape has changed, and yet the population really took off.\u201d<\/p>\n
Turkeys play an important role in a healthy ecosystem as both predator and prey, he said, and are a popular draw for hunters. But the restoration effort is also important just for the sake of ensuring native species continue to persist, he said.<\/p>\n
Dorsey, at the National Wild Turkey Federation, agreed, noting that turkey restoration projects also helped states revive their populations of other species.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of good work gets done on the back of the wild turkey,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CONCORD, N.H. \u2014 No one wants a weasel on their Thanksgiving table, but swapping turkeys for other animals…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":411734,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[3425,64,57,1165,159,61,67,132,68,837],"class_list":{"0":"post-411733","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-animals","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-general-news","11":"tag-lifestyle","12":"tag-science","13":"tag-u-s-news","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-unitedstates","16":"tag-us","17":"tag-wildlife"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115630229653294180","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=411733"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411733\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/411734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=411733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=411733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=411733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}