12 
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. 
Meleagris Gallopavo, Linn . 
PLATE CCLXXXVII. — 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, I found a single feather that had been dropped from the tail of a 
