As you carve that big roasted turkey on Christmas Day, I wonder how many will ask: why is a bird from America named after a country in Asia Minor?
Turkeys belong to the family Phasianidae, along with pheasants, peacocks, chickens, partridges, grouse and quails. This family is part of a larger category, the order Galliformes, which also includes the guineafowl of Africa, the curassows of South America, and the amusing incubator birds of Oceania.
There are two species of turkey: the wild turkey, Meleagris gallopavo, which lives in woodlands from south-east Canada down to Mexico; and the slightly smaller ocellated turkey, Meleagris ocellata, found only in the Yucatan Peninsula and a few places in Central America. A third species, the Californian turkey, Meleagris californica, became extinct about 10,000 years ago, mostly due to hunting by humans.
When the first English settlers in America saw these birds, they named them turkeys because, so the most logical theory goes, they resembled a bird they already knew – the turkey cock. Today we call this bird the guineafowl. It is native to Africa, but being good to eat, was brought to Europe, long before Christopher Columbus reached the New World, by traders from the Ottoman, or Turkish, Empire; therefore they were considered, inaccurately, birds from Turkey.
Meleagris actually comes from a Greek word for guineafowl, and gallopavo translates from Latin as ‘chicken peacock’. Pavo is also Spanish for a male turkey (‘pavo real’, or royal turkey, being their word for peacock). Other names for the turkey relate to India, because that was where Columbus thought he had landed, hence dinde or dindon in French, hindi in Turkish, and in Swedish, kalkon, after the Indian port city of Calicut.
Turkeys were domesticated in Mexico about 2,000 years ago. Spanish conquistadores brought them to Europe sometime in the early 16th century. They were introduced into England in 1541 by William Strickland, who sailed with Sebastian Cabot (son of John) on his voyages of discovery to the New World. Strickland became a wealthy landowner and Member of Parliament as a result of his adventures, and the turkey features on his family’s coat of arms; a turkey is also carved into the lectern in his village church in Yorkshire.
Many people nowadays don’t know what a wild turkey, or perhaps even a domesticated one, looks like before it is stuffed, seasoned and put in the oven. Female and young male wild turkeys resemble fat peahens or large, dark-coloured pheasants, but the mature male is a very different and most impressive creature. He is up to four feet long and can weigh more than thirty pounds. His feathers are black with green, copper and purple sheens, his tail is a great fan patterned with black, brown and gold bands. His head is quite bizarre: blue with pink caruncles, big warty wattles under his chin and the long, worm-like snood that hangs over his beak. When he is displaying, he fluffs out his feathers, his wings hang down to the ground, he holds his tail erect like a peacock, his wattles turn bright red and his snood elongates. Then he struts about with his chest puffed out, vibrating his feathers and making that distinctive gobbling sound.
Before colonisation by Europeans, there were millions of wild turkeys in North America. In the early days of the USA, the turkey was so important that there was a story, not exactly true, that Benjamin Franklin would have preferred it to the bald eagle as the country’s national bird. But by 1930, there were only about 30,000 left, their numbers decimated by hunting and deforestation. Now, through conservation and re-introductions, wild turkeys are once again common in the USA, and have even moved into cities where they have become quite a nuisance.
Turkey was once a rich man’s food; the usual Christmas bird in Britain was goose. But in the last hundred years or so, commercial breeding has reduced the price of turkeys. Those raised in intensive turkey farms have miserable lives, often crowded together – eight per square metre is normal – and they are allowed to live for only four or five months. Worldwide, about 620 million turkeys are slaughtered each year. In the USA, of course, the turkey is the central part of the Thanksgiving celebration, but it is the Israelis, surprisingly, who eat the most turkeys – 28.8 pounds per capita annually (it is their pork substitute) compared to 17 pounds per head for Americans.
If one is not religious, has no children, and doesn’t consider it vital to spend hundreds of euros on things that no one really needs, or perhaps even wants, then Christmas is just an excuse to eat and drink too much; until Covid put an end to my travels, I usually managed to avoid it completely. In most countries in which I lived, Christmas was a normal working day. In Saudi Arabia, the only trace of it were the jars of mincemeat hidden amongst the jam in the large supermarket used mostly by expats.
In China, Christmas is not a holiday, but I still had to teach my students all about it. They only knew the ‘Christmas Man’ who gave out presents. I said we called him Father Christmas, or Santa Claus, who evolved from St. Nicholas (the patron saint of sailors, brewers and prostitutes, though I didn’t tell them that), and then had to explain the word ‘saint’, which is almost impossible to atheists with poor English. On Christmas Eve in my first year there, all the foreigners in the city (Zibo, in Shandong Province) were invited to dinner at a big, expensive hotel. Turkey and ham were on the menu, but so too were spicy pig’s lungs, battered goose liver, chicken hearts, and snake and tortoise stew; (after all that, I stopped eating meat). There was also Christmas cake, which the Chinese ate before and in between stick-fulls of drunken shrimp, pig’s nose, bull’s aorta, and meatballs with sea cucumber.
In Africa, it was easy to escape from Christmas entirely, to find a bus, train or old steamer going somewhere far away from Santa Claus and Slade. Most Africans can never afford to eat turkey, but one occasionally sees a few, the white domestic version, seemingly lost and ownerless, pecking at the ground like chickens beside busy roads. I once met a large dark coloured male in full breeding attire while staying at a little resort run by German missionaries beside Lake Malawi. I was walking to the restaurant one morning when this huge bird chased after me. I had to run as he was extremely angry – explaining to him that I was now a vegetarian made no difference. But then it was mid-December.
One is far more likely to see wild guineafowl than domestic turkeys in Africa. There are eight species, most of which live in the forests of western and central Africa. The helmeted guineafowl (Numida meleagris) is found over much of the continent, and has been domesticated and introduced to many other parts of the world; it is the bird that was once called a turkey cock. Small flocks of them are a common sight on safaris, as well as in people’s backyards. They are attractive birds in a funny sort of way, with bald blue heads and red wattles, a bony crest, and a plumage of dark grey finely spotted with white. There is a species of butterfly in Africa similarly coloured, and so it is named after the bird.
Guineafowl are very noisy, and appear even more stupid than turkeys. I found them most annoying when I was working in a wildlife reserve in Malawi one winter. Often, when tramping cautiously through the forest, worried about snakes and bush pigs, I got an almighty fright as several guineafowl exploded out of the undergrowth. Then after dark, when I was beside a lake attempting to record frog calls (they are distinctive for each species), a family of guineafowl would always start making their ludicrous din – an exceedingly loud mixture of metallic piping and raspy clucking – which ruined my recordings.
I have never tried guineafowl, and I haven’t eaten turkey for at least thirty years. For Christmas lunch this year, as last, I will probably have a delicious, homemade, cheese and nut roast – no cruelty, no slaughter, no guilt.
