The Turkey That Turned Heads

EAST HARWICH – What’s more unlucky than being a turkey just before Thanksgiving? Perhaps being one that’s snow white, devoid of the natural camouflage that helps them avoid predators. 

White turkeys like the one recently spotted in a residential neighborhood of East Harwich are an unexpected find, but experts say they’re not as unusual as it might seem.

 “People like to report those,” said Mark Faherty, science coordinator at Mass Audubon’s Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary. Generally people speculate that they are domestic turkeys that somehow flew the coop and took up with their wild counterparts, but the truth is less exciting. “It’s just pretty common for wild turkeys to be white sometimes naturally,” he said.

 It’s probably not correct to refer to the East Harwich turkey as albino, since “a true albino is kind of a high bar,” Faherty said. In true albinism, animals are completely devoid of pigments, and in the case of birds, that would include the legs and eyes. Faherty said it’s more likely that this bird is “leucistic,” or has partial albinism, which is much more common. In this genetic trait, melanin and other pigments are absent from most feathers. “It’s pretty common in turkeys,” he said.

 It is also occasionally seen in other local birds; look for chickadees which have white feathers on their back, or crows with some white on their wings, he said.

 What does make a white turkey improbable is the fact that, in a crowd of brown turkeys, white ones are at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to avoiding predators.

 “It doesn’t seem like a very good strategy if you’re a turkey, especially with Thanksgiving coming up,” Faherty quipped.

Happily for turkeys on the Lower Cape, there don’t seem to be many predators capable of arranging a turkey feast at any time of the year, Faherty said. 

 They remain a bit mysterious, however, particularly when it comes to how they congregate.

 “I’m just constantly puzzled by turkeys,” he said. In his neighborhood, a group of around 30 turkeys seems to randomly assemble at times. “They’re moving around. Sometimes it’s all males, sometimes it’s mixed, sometimes it’s all females,” he said. Occasionally in the winter there will be “superflocks” of more than 100 turkeys in one area, often made up of the poults (yearlings) who were hatched the previous summer. These age groups seem to sometimes grow up and form flocks together. 

 If you’ve been on Cape Cod for more than a few decades, you’ll remember a time when there were no wild turkeys to be seen. While they were present before the 1850s, they fell victim to unregulated hunting and deforestation until 1989, when state biologists released 18 wild turkeys at Camp Edwards on the Upper Cape. In the mid 1990s, 28 more turkeys – five toms and 23 hens from New York state – were released near the Cape Cod National Seashore in Wellfleet. Today’s wild turkeys are descendents of those birds.

 “Every turkey that you see is the result of a successful reintroduction effort,” Faherty said.