Turkey Tales: Fun Facts, Myths and the Presidential Pardon

The wild turkey is a forest bird native only to North America, one that flies, sleeps in trees and puts on a colorful show every spring. Thanksgiving has also gathered a few turkey stories over the years, and the true versions are just as much fun as the ones people repeat.

A Bird That Flies and Sleeps in Trees

A wild gobbler stands 2.5 to 3 feet tall and weighs up to 25 pounds, about 16 on average, while adult hens weigh 9 to 10 pounds. For all that weight, wild turkeys are estimated to fly at 40 to 55 mph and can cover more than a mile in the air. When danger comes they usually escape on foot, and they swim easily too.

Each evening the flock flies up into the trees to spend the night. Anywhere from 6 to 40 birds may share one tree or a few neighboring ones, and in bad weather they favor conifers. In the early morning they glide back down. Poults learn the trick young: once their wing feathers grow in, at roughly 10 days to 2 weeks old, they can roost in the trees with the hens.

Spring is the gobbler's season. He gobbles to call in hens and claim his territory, his wattles redden, and the fleshy snood between his eyes swells and lengthens during courtship while his head shifts among red, blue, purple and white.

Franklin's Turkey Lived in a Letter to His Daughter

Benjamin Franklin's turkey remark is the one everyone knows, and the real story is a family letter. On January 26, 1784, he wrote to his daughter, Sarah Bache, about the Society of the Cincinnati and the eagle on its figure. He wished the bald eagle "had not been chosen as the Representative of our Country," and called it "a Bird of bad moral Character" that "does not get his Living honestly." His complaint was about how the bald eagle eats: he described it chasing the fishing hawk and taking the fish it had caught.

The turkey, he wrote, was "a much more respectable Bird" and "a true original Native of America." He admitted it was "a little vain and silly," but "a Bird of Courage" that "would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards" who came into its farmyard "with a red Coat on," and he was not displeased that the society's figure "looks more like a Turkey." It was a private letter, one the National Archives still lists as unpublished. It reads like a father sharing a joke with his daughter, and it still makes people smile more than 240 years later.

The 1621 Menu Named Venison and Wildfowl

The harvest celebration at Plymouth in the fall of 1621 lasted three days, and the only eyewitness account mentions just two foods: venison and wildfowl. Edward Winslow wrote that four men sent out fowling killed "as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week." Ousamequin presented five deer to the English leaders, a gift that was essential to the diplomacy of the event.

Turkey may well have been there. Governor William Bradford wrote of a "great store of wild turkeys" that same fall, and Plimoth Patuxet Museums call turkey at the feast probable. That is as close as the record gets, and with a week's worth of fowl and five deer, nobody went hungry.

How the Pardon Became a Tradition

Turkeys reached the White House long before anyone pardoned one. A Rhode Island poultry dealer named Horace Vose sent birds to presidents of both parties from the Grant years until his death in 1913, and from 1946 poultry groups took over the job of presenting them. According to HISTORY, the Truman Library found no records showing that Truman pardoned a turkey. In 1963, John F. Kennedy spared a 55-pound bird and sent it back to a California farm.

The word "pardon" itself seems to have arrived as a joke. In 1987, Ronald Reagan sidestepped reporters' questions about whether he would pardon aides caught up in the Iran-Contra scandal. When they asked about the fate of the 55-pound turkey he had just been given, he joked, "I'll pardon him." Two years later, on November 17, 1989, George H. W. Bush stood before reporters and 30 schoolchildren in the Rose Garden, promised the tom would not end up on anyone's dinner table, and granted it "a presidential pardon as of right now." The pardon has been a cheerful part of every Thanksgiving since.

The Wild Turkey's Great Comeback

The happiest turkey story is the one in the woods. Settlers cleared the forests and shot turkeys for food, and by 1800 market hunters in Pennsylvania were selling them for as little as 6 cents each. By 1900 the state had an estimated 3,500 to 5,000 birds left, and by the 1930s wild turkeys had disappeared from at least 20 states.

The first rescue attempts did not work. Pennsylvania released more than 200,000 game-farm turkeys between 1930 and 1980, and they proved nearly useless in the wild. Two things turned it around. Farms abandoned during the Great Depression slowly grew back into grass, shrubs and trees, which is turkey country. Then wildlife managers learned to catch wild birds safely with rocket and cannon nets and move them to empty range.

Pennsylvania's trap-and-transfer program moved nearly 2,800 wild turkeys to 39 counties from 1960 to 2003 and sent almost 900 more to nine other states, and it became a model for every state. Today the wild turkey lives in every county in Pennsylvania, and relocation has spread it across dozens of states. From as few as 3,500 birds in 1900, Pennsylvania alone had about 159,000 wild turkeys by 2021.

Heritage Breeds, a Living Tradition

Farm turkeys come in many named varieties. The Livestock Conservancy's 2026 Conservation Priority List names the Beltsville Small White, White Holland, Black, Bourbon Red, Royal Palm, Slate, Standard Bronze and Narragansett as heritage breeds worth keeping going. The broad-breasted birds raised for most tables are left off the list "because they are not endangered."

The heritage birds have been coming back. A 1997 census found only 1,335 breeding heritage turkeys in the whole United States. With the help of marketing and education, that number climbed to 4,275 by 2003, and by 2007 it passed 10,000.

Gobbles in the Woods, Bronze on the Farm

Somewhere this Thanksgiving, a flock of wild turkeys will flap up into the branches at dusk, a Bourbon Red will strut around a farmyard, and a lucky bird at the White House will get its pardon. Pass the cranberry sauce, and save a thought for the bird that came back to the woods.

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Sources & Further Reading