42 THE WILD TURKEY. 



lower extremity; toes of moderate length, stout, scutella; first small and 

 elevated; lateral about equal, third much longer; anterior webbed at the 

 base. Claws of moderate length, stout, arched, somewhat compressed, 

 obtuse. Plumage compact, glossy; feathers very broad and truncate; those 

 of the rump elongated. Wings of moderate length, concave, much rounded, 

 with the fourth and fifth quills longest; secondaries very long and broad. 

 Tail rather long, very broad, much rounded, of fourteen or eighteen very 

 broad, broadly rounded feathers. (Esophagus dilated into a very large crop; 

 stomach transversely elliptical, extremely muscular; intestines long and 

 wide; cceca very large, oblong. 



THE WILD TURKEY. 



f Meleagris Gallopavo, Linn. 

 PLATE CCLXXXVIL— Male. PLATE CCLXXXVIIL— Female. 



The great size and beauty of the Wild Turkey, its value as a delicate and 

 highly prized article of food, and the circumstance of its being the origin of 

 the domestic race now generally dispersed over both continents, render it 

 one of the most interesting of the birds indigenous to the United States of 

 America. 



The unsettled parts of the States of Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois, and Indiana, 

 an immense extent of country to the north-west of these districts, upon the 

 Mississippi and Missouri, and the vast regions drained by these rivers from 

 their confluence to Louisiana, including the wooded parts of Arkansas, 

 Tennessee, and Alabama, are the most abundantly supplied with this mag- 

 nificent bird. It is less plentiful in Georgia and the Carolinas, becomes still 

 scarcer in Virginia and Pennsylvania, and is now very rarely seen to the 

 eastward of the last mentioned States. In the course of my rambles through 

 Long Island, the State of New York, and the country around the Lakes, I 

 did not meet with a single individual, although I was informed that some 

 exist in those parts. Turkeys are still to be found along the whole line of 

 the Alleghany Mountains, where they have become so wary as to be 

 approached only with extreme difficulty. While in the Great Pine Forest 

 in 1829, 1 found a single feather that had been dropped from the tail of a 



