BIRDS OF THE CAMBRIDGE REGION. 171^ 



it has been feared they may eventually do, — or devastate our cultivated crops, — as they are 

 already accused o£ doing, — it would have been much wiser to expend the tiine and money which 

 have been devoted to their naturalization in fostering and increasing our stock of native game 

 birds.] 



[Meleagris gallopavo silvestris (Vieill.). Wild Turkey. The works of Morton, Wood, 

 Josselvn and other early writers on New England furnish convincing evidence that the Wild 

 Turkey was abundant in eastern Massachusetts when the country was first settled. Morton, re- 

 ferring, no doubt, to his experience at Merrymount, now WoIIaston, only a few miles south of 

 the Cambridge Region, where he lived from 1625 to 162S, and again in 1629 and 1630, says : 

 "great flocks [of Turkeys] have fallied by our doores ; .... I had a Salvage who hath taken out 

 his boy in a morning, and they have brought home tlieir loades about noone. I have afked 

 them what number they found in the woods, who have anfwered Neent Metawna, which is a 

 thofand that day.'" Wood confirms this by stating that "fometimes there will be forty, three- 

 fcore, and an hundred of a fiocke, fometimes more and fometimes leffe ; their feeding is Acornes, 

 Hawes, and Berries, fonie of them get a haunt to frequent our Englifh corne : In Winter when 

 the Snow covers the ground, they refort to the Sea fhore to looke for Shrimps, and fuch fmall 

 Fifhes at low tides. Such as love Turkie hunting, muft folllow it in Winter after a new falne 

 Snow, when he may follow them by their tracts ; fome have killed ten or a dozen in halfe a day; 

 if they can be found towards an evening and watched where they peirch, if one come about ten 

 or eleaven of the clocke, he may fhoote as often as he will, they will fit, unleffe they be flenderly 

 wounded. Thefe Turkie remaine al the yeare long, the price of a good Turkie cocke is foure 

 fliiliings; aTid he is well worth it, for he may be in weight forty pound; a Hen two fhillings."^ 

 Josselyn mentions seeing, probably at Black Point (now Scarborough), Maine, "threefcore 

 broods of young Ticrkies on the fide of a Marfh, funning of themfelves in a morning betimes, 

 but this was thirty years fince [in 1638 or 1639], the Englifh and the Indian having now [1671] 

 deftroyed tl\e breed, fo that 'tis very rare to meet witli a wild Turkic in the Woods.'" 



That the species was formerly found throughout the Cambridge Region, there can be no 

 reasonable doubt. Turkey Hill in Arlington may well have derived its name from the presence 

 there of this noble bird in early Colonial days. Indeed, Mr. Walter Faxon writes me that an 

 acquaintance of his has seen "in a manuscript diary of the ancestor of an Arlington man .... 

 an entry of killing some Wild Turkeys in the region about Turkey Hill." At Concord, less 

 than ten miles further inland, the species had not become wholly extinct at the beginning of the 

 past century. The late Steadman Buttrick of that town, a keen lover of field sports and a man 

 of undoubted veracity, who died in 1874, used to delight in narrating liow, when a boy, he had 

 male repeated but invariably fruitless expeditions in pursuit of the last Wild Turkey that is 

 known to have lingered in the region about his home. He often saw the bird, a fine old gobbler, 

 but it was so very wary that neither he nor any of the other Concord gunners of that d.iy ever 

 succeeded in getting a fair shot at it. It was in the habit of roosting in some tall pines on Ball's 

 Hill whence, when disturbed, it usuallj' flew for refuge into an extensive wooded swamp on the 

 opposite (Bedford) side of Concord River. Mr. Buttrick was born in 1796. As he was pre- 

 sumably at least twelve or fifteen years of age before he began to use a gun effectively, it is 

 probable that his experience with the Wild Turkey happened some time between 1808 and 1815.] 



'Thomas Morton, New English Canaan, 1637, 69-70. Ed. C. F. Adams, Jr., 1883, 192-193. 

 "William \Vood, New Englands Prospect, ed. 2, 1635, ^S- Charles Deane's ed., 1S65, 32. 

 ^ John Josselyn, New-Englands Rarities Discovered, 1672, 9. E. Tuckerman's ed., 1865, 42. 



