I have a drawer in which I put certain things that are important to me. I found myself looking in it recently to find a small bag of feathers. Each of these has a surreal green-gold to bronze iridescence that jumps out from it, a glint that is as surprising as a rainbow. I found feathers like these the first time in a meadow in the hills where I had retreated to find an answer to a private crisis. They were a familiar sign, that no matter what my grief or problem there is beauty that carries on in nature if I open my eyes to look for it.

These feathers I realized later belong to a bird that was introduced to California, the Wild Turkey, Meleagris gallopavo, a more regal and wild version of the common domestic turkey. There are five subspecies in the Americas; we have two: the "Rio Grande", sometimes called the "Rocky Mountain" because of its normal range, and the "Merriams" of the Southwest. They may have been introduced here as part of a program to revive declining populations nationwide. Wild turkeys were gone or nearly extinct in many states in the U.S. by the early part of this century because of hunting and habitat destruction and fragmentation. The recent program has been quite successful, in part because of increasing collaboration between game managers, landowners, hunters and wildlife biologists. A true turkey hunter is often as passionate about this remarkable bird as a flyfisherman is about wild trout. Both have been strong allies in the protection of habitat that help many native species. I have seen wild turkeys now in both of our local mountain ranges.

The turkey got its name by accident. While sources disagree on details, it appears that in the sixteenth century some people confused the newly arrived American bird to be from the country Turkey, and the name stuck. Centuries later, Ben Franklin thought the wild bird was so regal that he lobbied to have it become our national bird. Franklin's proposal was turned down in favor of the bald eagle.

Like many animals, turkeys have an interesting life cycle. In the spring, dominant adult males establish a territory and earn their name, "gobblers" by the loud gurgling call they use to attract females. When the prospective females eventually arrive, and as long as any female or other male is around to notice, the dominant gobbler will strut about, fan out his feathers including his impressive iridescent tail, and the blood will literally rush to his head as his comb or "caruncle" inflates and turns from red to blue to almost white. I imagine these colors did not get lost on Ben Franklin. Meanwhile, a receptive female will come forward, mate and move on, sometimes to find other males. Eventually she will create her nest on the ground in the forest or under low plant cover.

The female or hen will lay between 9-12 eggs which require 28 days of incubation. Hens will begin to call to their young before they are born and it is speculated that this call helps synchronize the young to all hatch out within a single day, even though the eggs will have been laid over a period of up to two weeks. The hen and her young "poults" will cover a widening area to find food, which includes insects, berries, and nuts, especially acorns. Jakes, or young males, will set off in the fall and eventually compete as adult males to establish a territory. Turkeys ultimately require many square miles of territory of linked woodland habitat to survive. This fact, along with high rates of predation and low success rates for nesting combine to quickly reduce their numbers when we are not careful to preserve habitat.

Our area was for many years as famous for domestic turkeys as it was for wines. With the arrival of the wild turkey, no doubt Ben Franklin would say, we have yet another reason to be proud to be from turkey country.