Happy Thanksgiving!
Today is a great day to express appreciation for many things, turkey being pretty high up on the list. Besides being delicious, the turkey is special in that it is one of the only domestic animals to come out of the New World. While Europe, Asia, and Africa gave us the domestic cat, cow, pig, sheep, goat, duck, swan, and chicken (to say nothing of the much less-utilized camels, reindeer, water buffalo, and yak), the Americas gave us the turkey, the llama, the alpaca, the guinea pig, and the Muscovy duck. Of those, only the turkey was present in North America. Both hemispheres had domesticated dogs, though they were far more prevalent and diverse in the Old World than the New.
I suppose the first Thanksgiving could have been a very different one if Europeans came to America and found herds of domestic bison or peccary. Alas, only the turkey was domesticated - and only in parts of its range. When Cortez and his men visited the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, long before the Pilgrims hit Plymouth Rock, Emperor Montezuma II was going through hundreds of turkeys a day to feed the big cats, raptors, and other predators of his private zoo.
What a lot of folks don't realize is that there are two turkeys native to the New World. The domestic turkey is descended for the wild turkey, which looks like a sleeker, cagier version of its Butterball cousin. On the Yucatan, however, we find the ocellated turkey.
The ocellated turkey is considerably smaller than the wild turkey of North America. That, along with its much smaller range, might have had something to do with it never being domesticated. Personally, I wonder if the warts have something to do with it. The face of both sexes is electric blue, covered with bright orange warts. The first picture I ever saw of one was when I was a small child reading my Ranger Rick magazines, with a photo spread devoted to solving the question of which was the ugliest bird in the world. The bird which I photographed above is, to be a fair, a lot less warty than the extreme example I saw in the magazine.
Other contestants included the shoebill and the California condor, but my vote went straight to the turkey.
Not that being ugly has spared the ocellated turkey from the dinner table - it's just eaten on a much smaller, much more local scale, hunted by local peoples. No one is accusing the domestic turkey of being the most handsome of birds. I wonder what it would do to its popularity if it, too, looked like a diseased, Day-Glo nightmare of a bird.
The first picture I ever saw of one was when I was a small child reading my Ranger Rick magazines, with a photo spread devoted to solving the question of which was the ugliest bird in the world.
ReplyDeleteOh wow, that's exactly where I first learned of this species, too. I recall the photograph showing only the bird's head, and it was accompanied by a caption along the lines of "I could show you my tail, but then you wouldn't vote for me as the ugliest bird!"