WILD TURKEYS OF ONTARIO

TRANSCRIPT

Beechwood cemetery, in Ottawa. Founded just 14 years after Ottawa was selected by Queen Victoria as the capital of the Dominion of Canada, its peaceful paths meander through more than a century of history and expansion, stately monuments and weathered stone. 

Among the former prime ministers, inventors of modern time zones and foremost field naturalists, there’s something else to discover here, seen wandering the winding roads or glimpsed in between the graves…

Turkeys.

And maybe the weirdest thing about them is, ultimately, how unremarkable they are. Today, a flock of wild turkeys in the dead of winter in an urban cemetery is… kind of no big deal.

But it certainly took a big deal to get here. A story about how conservation can make for strange bedfellows, how the ends maybe justify the means. Why are there wild turkeys gallivanting through Beechwood cemetery in February? Because of a thirst for blood and reducing animals to bargaining chips.

For 70 years, there were no turkeys in Ontario at all. It’s the usual story from a time when we didn’t think human activity could ever actually have a large-scale effect on nature. So we hunt the hell out of turkeys. They’re so prolific in colonial Canada that they’re considered pests. Bounties are placed on their heads and hunting is permitted year-round.

But maybe even worse than the slaughter, especially starting in the 1880s, we systematically eliminate their habitat.

The old Ontario turkey is a particular bird - set in its ways. They need, for example, a specific mix of deciduous forest and grassland to thrive. This provides brood cover - a canopy to keep their kids safe, while still allowing for easy ground movement. Plus, it’s abundant with the insects they rely on for food.

But when you convert that habitat to agricultural land, it’s not just an inconvenience for them. You can severely limit their ability to successfully breed, and for their young to survive and eat.

So as we terraform the province into farmland and continue to hunt turkeys with abandon and without a smidge of regulation, they’re pushed further into the margins and eventually disappear entirely.

By 1909, we don’t think we don’t think there’s a single wild turkey left in Ontario.

In the following decades there are some attempts to reintroduce them to the wild. But none of them work. The problem is, wild male turkeys will not breed in captivity. So they hand-raise domestic turkeys, then release them. But these turkeys are even more particular. Too domesticated to make it on their own in the wild.

They even try a complex breeding strategy called backcrossing, breeding domesticated male turkeys with imported wild females, to try and repeatedly breed out the domesticity until the ones they’re releasing are only 1/8th domestic. But it’s still not enough. Even these turkeys aren’t cut out for the new, less wild wilds of Ontario.

So the efforts are abandoned, until: the late 1970s.

In 1979, something changes when Dr. David Ankney - former biology professor, and his buddy Joel Hopkins take a trip to Virginia to hunt turkeys. 

They have a great time. Such a great time that they get to thinking… ‘we shouldn’t have to cross an international border to kill this bird! We should be able to kill this bird at home!’

They’d probably quibble with that characterization. But they come back with a mission, roping in the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters of which Ankney would eventually become president. When they find out that budget freezes at the Ministry of Natural Resources are holding up movement on turkey reintroduction, Ankney writes a check himself. Which turns out to be a shrewd move. It never gets cashed, but it’s symbolic enough to get the ball rolling again.

Since the last disastrous attempts with domestic turkeys and backcrossing, a biologist in Missouri has also come up with a simpler and much more effective way to drive that reintroduction. 

They figure out that if you take 10-15 wild turkeys from an existing group and and drop them in a brand new environment… they tend to figure things out, establish a breeding population, and spread. And with advancements in the exciting field of net guns, it’s now much easier to capture an existing flock of turkeys as one.

Which is all great, it just leaves the question of where a turkey-free Ontario is going to get those initial groups to start new breeding populations.

That’s when the turkey re-introduction program, partnering with the National Wild Turkey Federation in South Carolina, roll up their sleeves… and start making deals.

So, what is a wild turkey worth? And I don’t mean dollars and cents. The deals we make with various US states aren’t purchases, they’re trades. The currency is wildlife. Their turkeys for Canadian critters they might have a deficit in.

So Missouri gets 18 of our river otters.

New York gets 120 Hungarian Partridges.

Michigan gets 50 Algonquin Moose.

Some states just straight up supply us turkeys without any animal trade, which you might think is the worst deal on this list, but it’s not, because we trade Iowa for Canada Geese.

From these initial deals, Ontario gets 274 turkeys to work with. Following the Missouri method, we take small groups and introduce them to various sites around the province, starting with 11 from Missouri in the Backus woods of Norfolk County. 

And as those populations expand, the MNR can pluck 10-15 turkeys from them, and expand them further…

All in all we relocate 4400 wild turkeys to new territory across the province. And how’re they doing? Today, it’s estimated we’re back to over 100,000 turkeys in Ontario. So many that Ankney and Hopkins got two hunting seasons a year. 

All of those hundred thousand plus turkeys are direct descendants of the 274 traded turkeys from the US.

But hold on now. This turkey tragedy all started because we’d terraformed their territory, right? And it’s not like we’ve scaled back our own expansion since then. So why was it a problem for them in the late 1800s and not now?

Well, because the turkeys we’ve brought up to repopulate aren’t the delicate, polite Canadian birds. They’re American! Now we may be staring down the opposite problem. They’re too adaptable, too eager to move in and expand. We don’t have to relocate them anymore, they’re spreading on their own - into territories that we’re pretty sure have never been part of their ancestral range. There are now turkeys in Muskoka, for example, which never used to have them, even when they were native.

These new American imports don’t need the delicate mix of deciduous and grassland. They’ll eat anything. They’ll make do with just about any environment.

Which comes with some worrying questions we have yet to answer: are these turkeys disrupting ecosystems, pushing out other native species, decimating ground-nesting birds by eating their eggs, expanding too fast and far?

We just don’t know yet. We’re still trying to wrap our heads around the impact of it all - of having growing populations of turkeys on our agricultural land. Across the Canadian shield. In our cities. Even… in our cemeteries.