The Eastern Wild Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo silvestris) is native to Pennsylvania’s Great Outdoors region. Adult wild turkeys have long legs. The body feathers are generally blackish and dark with a coppery sheen. Adult males, called toms or gobblers, have a large, featherless, reddish head and neck. The head has fleshy growths called caruncles. Juvenile males are called jakes. The difference between an adult male and a juvenile is that the jake has a very short beard and his tail fan will have longer feathers in the middle. The adult male’s tail fan feathers will be all the same length. When gobblers are excited, a fleshy flap on the bill (called a snood) expands and the bare skin of the head and neck all become engorged with blood. They also have a spur behind each of their legs. The male turkey is substantially larger than the female. Females, called hens, have feathers that are duller overall, in shades of brown and gray. Turkeys have between 5,000 to 6,000 feathers. Males typically have at least one “beard”, a tuft of coarse hair-like filaments growing from the center of the breast. These beards grow continuously during the turkey’s lifespan. Approximately 10% of females have a beard, usually shorter and thinner than that of the male. Two large studies show that the average weight of adult males is 17 pounds, and the average weight of adult females is 9.4 pounds. The record-sized adult male wild turkey, according to the National Wild Turkey Federation, weighed a whopping 37.1 pounds. Wild turkeys prefer hardwood and mixed conifer-hardwood forests with scattered openings such as pastures, fields, and orchards. Wild turkeys are omnivorous, foraging on the ground for insects, berries, acorns, nuts and other hard mast food sources. Turkeys are ground nesting birds. Nests are shallow dirt depressions engulfed with woody vegetation. Hens lay a clutch of 10–14 eggs, usually one per day. The eggs are incubated for at least 28 days.

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