Wild turkeys have enjoyed a unique distribution cycle. Spanish explorers found these big, flavorful birds in the Americas and hauled them back to Spain, whence they spread across Europe. In sixteenth-century England, they were highly enough regarded to be served as a table delicacy to Henry VIII. A century later, the prudent Pilgrims brought them along to the New World, only to find the woods of New England resounding with the gobblers’ call. (It was while making its way across Europe, by the way, that the bird received its common English name, probably through the erroneous assumption that it had come from Turkey.)

It’s well known that Benjamin Franklin believed the useful, attractive, and thoroughly indigenous wild turkey would have made a more appropriate national emblem than the bald eagle. In his day they were plentiful enough to be sold in the marketplace for a penny a pound. But the axes and blunderbusses of the settlers told a predictable tale. Franklin died in 1790; surely he would have been saddened to learn that the bird was gone from New England a half-century later.

Those same causes—overhunting and habitat loss—continued to decimate wild turkey populations in other areas of the country as well, and by the middle of the twentieth century the situation reached its nadir. Here in Georgia, the turkey population was down to just a few thousand birds in the whole state, and reliable estimates put the total number of wild turkeys nationwide at a mere 130,000. In the 1970s, though, captive breeding and relocation programs began to reverse the decline, and by 1980 the count, nationally, was back up to 1.8 million.

Moving to the woods 15 years ago, we numbered ourselves among the beneficiaries of the turkey’s resurgence. Before we got dogs, the handsome birds helped themselves to the grass seed as soon as I could scatter it, and, a.d., they still scratched in the woods, roosted in the trees, and called to one another down by the creek on warming spring nights.

But latter-day pilgrims are arriving in droves, it seems, and our little northeast corner of Paulding County has been transformed into a patchwork of subdivisions. My journal confirms that we haven’t seen a gobbler on the property in more than two years.

For that I’m sorry. Otherwise, on this Thanksgiving Day, 2009, I will count my many blessings. Peace . . .