Ologies with Alie Ward - Meleagrology (TURKEYS) with Cyler Conrad

Episode Date: May 6, 2026

Wattles. Snoods. Struts. Vibes. It’s not November, which is exactly why we’re putting this episode out. All day every day, turkeys are out there like beanbags with stick legs. Let’s take a moment, or 90 minutes, with Archaeologist, Meleagrologist, and turkey researcher,  Dr. Cyler Conrad. We’ll find out if they can fly, do they like to kiss, where did they get their audacity, turkeys versus my car door, if they can survive a rainstorm, the deep connections between Indigenous cultures and North American turkeys, creepy turkeys, alternative universes, if one can eat turkey eggs, where do they nest, what’s up with the wishbone and so many inconvenient facts that will have you questioning what you thought you knew about these so-called thunder chickens.  Follow Dr. Conrad on Google Scholar A donation went to the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center More episode sources and links Other episodes you may enjoy: Chickenology (HENS & ROOSTERS), Condorology (CONDORS & VULTURES), Ornithology (BIRDS), Food Anthropology (FEASTS), Indigenous Cuisinology (NATIVE COOKING), Plumology (FEATHERS), Indigenous Pedology (SOIL SCIENCE), Oology (EGGS), Experimental Archeology (OLD TOOLS/ATLATLS), Araneology (SPIDERS) 400+ Ologies episodes sorted by topic Smologies (short, classroom-safe) episodes Sponsors of Ologies Transcripts and bleeped episodes Become a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month OlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, hoodies, totes! Follow Ologies on Instagram and Bluesky Follow Alie Ward on Instagram and TikTok Editing by Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio Productions and Jake Chaffee Managing Director: Susan Hale Scheduling Producer: Noel Dilworth Transcripts by Aveline Malek  Website by Kelly R. Dwyer Theme song by Nick Thorburn Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Oh, hey, it's the middle-aged lady signing up for a flamenco class, Allie Ward, and don't you dare assume this is an encore episode. Turkeys in May, you ask? Have you ever heard of an edit calendar you may be asking me? I have, and I don't care. This is a natural fit for coming out in November, which is why we're putting it out in May. I want you to hear about the wonders of giant birds all year round because they're out there gobble squawking and manipulating you, every day the sun shines and even on days that it doesn't. So we're putting this fresh, brand new episode out in May. As it turns out, I've lived my life greatly misinformed about turkeys. And unless you're a maligrologist, you will also be shocked. Speaking of theology, it is impossible to say, I just tried to say it several times and had to cut out the blunders. But this term

has been used exactly once as far as the literature goes, but I'm going to stick to it. So the genus and species of the bird in question is Melagris Galopavo and it's the turkey and its name means literally guinea fowl rooster peacock and in some indigenous languages the name just translates to big bird

large they are around 20 pounds in the wild 40 pounds chunkers in captivity and they're majestic with every feather so this ologist has studied them for years and they got their PhD in anthropology archaeology at the University of New Mexico where they are an adjunct

assistant professor. They've worked as an archaeologist and tribal technical liaison for Los Alamos National Labs. They've also worked as a cultural resources, environmental scientist. I love this episode. I want to kiss a turkey. I shall not. But I shall thank everyone at patreon.com slash ologies for ologies for making the show possible. You two can join it, submit your questions for the ologists for just a dollar a month. And thank you to everyone for clothing themselves in ologiesmerch from ologiesmerch.com. And thanks as always to everyone who leaves reviews for me to read and here's a hot one off the press from Mega KS98 who wrote, Ali, you befuddle me. I don't know how you and your team do it, but you always manage to pull

together a seamless episode with side notes that always flow into the dialogue of the episode with ease. Mega KS 98, thank you so much for that. And answer your question, how do we do it? We do it by crawling our way every week to Tuesday nights. Sometimes I'm like, why don't I have a podcast where I make fart noises into a mic and like recap TV episodes? But know, I make a science podcast where I make fart noises into a mic only on occasion. And I recap scientific papers about horny birds. And I hope you like this one. There's definitely some of that in there. I love making the show. I keep saying I'll make it till I die. Who knows? It might be sooner more than later. I love it. It's a lot of work. It's worth it. Also, if anyone needs episodes

for kids, we have them in their own feed and they're called Smologis. S-M-O-L-G-I-E-S. You can tell your teachers and friends with kids. Okay, let's strut ourselves out. Into the episode and Talk Turkey with an expert who will discuss if they can fly, if they like to kiss. Where did they get their audacity? Turkeys versus my car door. If they can survive a rainstorm, the deep connections between indigenous cultures and North American turkeys, gobbling, waddles, snoods, car wrinkles, creepy turkeys, alternate

universes. Why the turkeys that get pardoned don't look like the roaming turkeys that ruin your grandma's garden? If one can eat turkey eggs, where do they nest? Does a turkey have a house? What's up with a wishbone? And so many inconvenient facts that will have you questioning what you thought you knew about these so-called thunder chickens with zoarchologist, turkey scientist, and meleagrologist, Dr. Seiler Conrad. Siler Conrad, he, him?

Cool. I told my husband I was interviewing you and he was like, that's not a real name. Siler Conrad is like superhero name. Like, that's a great name. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. That's. I appreciate that. I've always thought that if I could have a superpower, it would be amazing to hear and talk to animals, like all animals. Can you imagine the things you would learn? Oh. So I'll take that to heart.

What's the first animal you'd talk to? Would it be a turkey? You know, actually, it would be a spider because I need to talk through my decades-long fear of them to understand them a little bit better and apologize probably to their ancestors that I have squished many times over. So I think spiders. The spider's like, oh, here he comes. Here he comes. Okay, heads up. If you have committed senseless spider side, which I suspect some of you have,

please listen to our Iraniology episode with Dr. Marshall Heaton, who will make you love and understand them. It has cured many in oligites arachnophobia, for real. And if it does not, seriously, I will refund your zero dollars that you spent listening to it. But on to birds. Where my sister lives, there are turkeys everywhere. Northern California, right? Yeah.

And so if you were to go, they will return your call. And I've done it a few times. Is that terrible for them? And I realize, am I stressing them out if I do that, right? Well, that's a good question. I also do that. And I've never really thought about if it stresses them out.

I think it speaks to this long-term connection between humans and turkeys and wanting to engage with them. And I think turkeys really want to engage with them. engage with us as humans. So I still do it. It might stress them out. But, you know, the tombs, the goblers, the ones that are responding and kind, they love to show off and do that anyway. So perhaps they're enjoying it. They are out there, feathers out, goblin around. I mean, I have so many broad questions. But once in my sister's yard, two tombs fighting, they had the other's beak in their mouths. They look like they were macking on each other.

that a fighting display or were they maybe just really good friends? Yeah, I would say that's probably a display. That would be quite common. And luckily, you know, the beaks is a little bit better for them than their spurs. Have you seen the spurs on their legs? No. The Tom's will have. Oh, yeah. These are little daggers hanging off their legs that they

use for defense, but also, you know, display and other types of, yeah, when they're kind of scrubbing it up to try and find a new mate, lots of different elements become involved there. Well, let's walk back and tell me what a turkey is. Is it turkey related to a peacock because they both have big tails? Are they closer to a grouse? Like, where do they live and where do they come from? So turkeys are galliforms. And turkeys evolved, these galliforms, kind of these ground-dwelling birds, although turkeys can fly.

They evolve somewhat independently. So I would say that they're related to pheasants and grouse more closely than, say, a songbird. But they really have their own independent domestication. it's interesting because turkeys are really a North American bird. So they evolved here within North America. That's something quite unique. Why not so much flying? How did a bird that's so big and such a prey item evolve to be more lumbering about than soaring overhead?

Or is that the big question? Turkeys, if you think about that question from the other side, what's predating them? You know, mountain lions, cougars will often go after turkeys. But they're big birds. So their size is helping them. Their size is certainly helping them in the environment today, considering the types of prey and predators that are around. You know, a turkey, a tom, a male turkey versus, say, household cat,

I might put my money on the turkey, especially with those spurs, with the beak. You know, I mean, they can easily defend themselves, especially when put in those situations. But it's a good question. Sort of thinking about what led them to this form that we see today. They were domesticated by Native American people here in North America. but they also have a long-term evolution, millions of years of evolution within North America, when there were much larger predators around. So it's a good question.

So, turkeys, been around for tens of millions of years, and the existing species has several subspecies, but they were, yes, domesticated in Mesoamerica, taken back to Europe after Spanish colonization. They became an instant hit in Spain in the early 1500s, and they made it to England. and then colonists brought them back to North America. Somewhere in that mishmash, someone is like, you try this new bird? I think they're like from Turkey. And then like a chat GPT fact that no one knows is a hallucination. It just stuck.

The myth had wings. How are they getting up in trees and how far can they fly? So they fly short distances, but they can get pretty fast actually. So they often like to nest in trees. Often they'll nest in trees kind of in and around water because they need water. There's a lot of insects around water that they love to gobble up. But that's a protection mechanism. So they're keeping themselves safe, their little flock of birds by kind of flying up into these trees.

So that's usually the extent of they're flying. But if there's a predator, they can kind of jump up and fly quickly. So these four foot tall feathered beanbags with legs can actually run much faster than you. up to 25 miles an hour. And they can fly as fast as the slow lane on a freeway. And as far as a football field at a stretch, just enough to get out of dodge. Technically, turkeys can also swim.

Did you know that? I bet you didn't. And when the situation calls for it, like to save their life or maybe at a peer pressure on a vacation, but they're not going across town. Yes, correct. They're not going across town. That would be quite the sight.

I know they're so huge. Yeah, I'm just trying to imagine what that would look quite incredible actually. Okay, imagine a few dozen, 20-pound chunks, wingspan as wide as a great eagret, iridescent, silky brown feathers all puffed up. They got chin danglers flapping in the wind, making flapping sounds. They really are flying short distances. They know what they're doing.

They're big birds, and they can defend themselves, and they like to strut around. I guess if they're not flying long distances, they don't migrate. Correct. They're non-migratory. Correct. And then where are they sleeping and where are they building nests? Yep. So sleeping typically in these roosts are kind of above ground.

So they try and find little areas. And in fact, for the indigenous domestication of these birds in the American Southwest and kind of Mexican northwest, they would often build ruse within Pueblo room blocks. So these elevated little areas, it just feels natural to them. They feel more protection that way. So they're often finding trees, clusters of trees where they will fly up. and sort of sleep through the night and stay safe and protected. But female hens, they will nest on the ground. They'll kind of find these enclosed areas. They'll build these nests. So they have

ground nests, but they like to sleep up if they can get up into the trees a little bit. Okay, so that is sleeping upstairs in a tree or perhaps in the alcoves of a Pueblo. And then downstairs on the ground, you get the babies. It seems backwards. Leave your delicious eggs and tiny, crunchy babies on the ground. And yeah, the rates of death for hens are highest during their incubation period. But I guess it's been working for them for the last 20 million years. To be frank, it's really none of my business how they raise their children. I always wondered with a big old bird like that, do they just cling on to a branch really tight? Or do they just sleep without tipping over? Because if you put me on a branch, I'm hitting the ground fast. And I always wondered how, how do any birds when they're roosting at

night. What does that even look like? Do you ever have to go out and do night field work? I just have no clue. I never have. No, birds are so interesting. Right. I mean, even when you look at a turkey, you immediately think to yourself, this is something from Jurassic Park. That's a dinosaur. You see the connection there, but they're able to stay balanced. It's just one of those remarkable things about turkeys. They're such amazing birds. Okay. So while turkeys are walking on their tiptoes, Some scientists think that, like other tree sleeping birds, when they squat down on a branch to sleep, there's a tendon that shortens up and then it locks the toes onto the branch. Other ornithologists think that turkeys, because they have front heavy bodies, are just using their breast heft to help just balance them. But they settle in at night.

Sometimes they fall prey to owls in the early morning. apparently if a male, a.k.a. a Tom, can't help himself and just lets out a morning gobbler that gives the whole roost away. Tom's, by the way, also called goblers. And in this instance, narcs or assholes. Do you think that turkeys are out there helping eat pest bugs? Like, are they eating ticks and things like that, or worms? That is a very tantalizing question. Yes. And it gets to, the heart of even how they were domesticated. So if you have maize fields, if you have corn, especially domesticated varieties, say, in the past, in the American Southwest, turkeys, we know from various lines of evidence, they were being used to eat little critters, kind of clean up areas, eat those bugs. There's an archaeologist who recently passed away, Charming and McCusick. And she told me once that a, I think it was in Arizona, like a fishing game officer,

found a turkey. It had been killed, I think, road killed. its stomach was chalk full of grasshoppers. They cut it open and it was just entirely full grasshoppers. So they love grasshoppers. They will just kind of chow down on all of these critters. And one of the things that I think is misunderstood about turkeys is that today in these large industrial scale agricultural settings, I think the assumption is that turkeys might be a pest to those fields because they might actually eat the crops. But there's some really interesting, important evidence that shows us that turkeys are actually individually eating insects and bugs.

So there's quite a benefit to have turkeys around. I think they're wonderful little critters. But for your sister, perhaps for others, they're probably also eating through gardens, especially today in the West. So that has its own response. Yeah. I was wondering about that. My mom did some landscaping recently, and she put up alarms to try to get them while her landscaping is taking root. Listen, mom, I get it. The landscaping looks amazing, and I don't have to live with turkeys trying to eat my plant roots or look for worms. These alarms, they're used for deer and skunks and cats and such, feature gunshot and dog barking noises.

It's intense. It's scary for wild critters and really anything that lives in America with the ballistics and the dogs. But the reviews say that they are very effective. But when it comes to some like North American history, I think some of us have heard that old story that Ben Franklin and said that our national bird should be a turkey and not a bald eagle. We've talked about that in a bird episode. With American history and domestication,

they were being domesticated far before we had apocryphal stories about Thanksgiving and American patriotism. Can you tell me a little bit about what drove you to study that domestication and that role from wild to livestock? Yeah. So my background, my specialty is in Zork.

So really studying, identifying animal bones and shells from these archaeological records. That led me to go to grad school, is at the University of New Mexico and Albuquerque. And my advisor, Dr. Emily Jones, who also big part of how I got into studying Turkey. So there were some interesting questions with these ancestral Pablo indigenous Native American sites within the southwest that have large collections of turkey bones. And one of the questions, this was many years ago now, was what were those turkeys eating? Because if you can figure out what the turkeys are eating, it might give you some insight into how humans are interacting with them. My dissertation research is on Thailand. It's on mainland Southeast Asia, kind of studying hunter-gatherers and what their diet was like for the last 12,000-ish years. So that Ph.D. of his side note is titled, Mainland Southeast Asia in the Long Dore, a zoological test of the Broad Spectrum Revolution in northern Thailand. And we'll link it on our website.

But Seiler says that they could use the same technology of testing for a geoconological. chemical signal embedded in turkey bones. And Mercedes Maitland, our lead editor with a background in archaeology, also noted that she might be biased because she bent her brain into pretzels. She says, learning about stable isotopes in undergrad, but she thinks it's fascinating because of its use in understanding, quote, the transition to agriculture in the Americas in a way that's not possible in most other places where agriculture originated because she says corn. She elaborates that, quote, you can't use carbon to ID wheat or barley or rice or rye, oats, potatoes, nuts, legumes, leafy green.

But corn? Yep. Mercedes. She contains multitudes and maybe some corn isotopes. You know, high fructose corn syrup, corn is basically in everything today. So even if you have a heavy kind of protein rich meat diet, if those animals are eating corn, they're going to have a corn signal. So you are what you eat, right?

So when you're looking at these geochemical signals and you're measuring, say, the isotopes of certain elements, carbon is really important. So you can pick up a plant signal from corn or from grasses. It's very distinct from, say, other types of plants, like, say a tree, something like that. If you measure the isotopes in your bones or in turkey bones, you can pick up this signal to understand, okay, what is it eating and what's that underlying diet like? That's so cool. Yeah, it's amazing. It's just incredible, sort of what different tissues and materials tell you about yourself or about some of these animals. And we thought, well, this is a really important and interesting question in the American Southwest. So let's work on these collections that led to sort of a love affair with turkeys. I mean, you know, there's just so many interesting questions. And once you start studying turkeys, I don't really know if there's a way to stop. I haven't found a way yet. Because they just, they're remarkable birds, how they interact with humans and what. what we're doing with them. So it led to many, many years now of studying different aspects of that human turkey relationship through time. Did you start off wanting to just dig through archaeological

sites? Did you see a movie about archaeology when you were a kid? What led you to want to like put on khakis and get out dental tools and start picking through things? That's a great question. What my parents tell me and what I do remember is that my younger sister and I grew up in Spokane, Washington. And from the youngest possible age, I can remember, we'd like to dig this hole in our backyard, just a giant hole. And by digging the hole, we started to find things. And I remember thinking, oh, this is so cool. You know, just bits and pieces of, oh, I remember finding a spark plug one time. So, you know, I mean, something from just people living there and kind of whoever owned the house. And I remember thinking that was so fun and interesting to sort of dig things up

and see and understand something about what happened there. My dad likes to tell a story that I then asked if I could paint my room the color of dirt from a very young age because I just really loves, I guess I didn't understand brown as a concept, but I really was excited about that. Can you paint your room dirt? You can. For example, you can take a pantone catalog and flip to color number 190914, TSX titled Fertile Soil for a paint match,

or go straight to the bear counter and ask for their ruddy, earth-fired red color, Or if you're looking for a less iron-rich look, you can opt for a paint called gardener's soil. And also, if you'd like to learn more about soil versus dirt and colors of it and native culture, you can listen to Dr. Lydia Jennings episode, Indigenous Pedology, which is about soil. So if a bedroom makeover also is too much work in the Bay Area in California, they're so in need of more affordable housing that sometimes people rent out of their crawl spaces. For proof of this, you can see the many news articles. It could be worse. Someone in San Francisco is charging $500 a month for a crawl space.

Heads up also, that article is from 2015, so that place is probably taken by now. Or it's like $3,000 a month. But back to simpler times, childhood. But I've always just been interested in history and anthropology and just understanding ourselves as humans and what humans have done through time. And again, having a particular preference for animals, they're just amazing creatures, right? And I'm trying to understand how humans and animals have interacted for so long. And with the Southwest and with indigenous culture in general on the continent, how far back is it estimated that this domestication and maze planting, things like that, went back? Is there even an answer to that?

Oh, yeah. There are a couple of different forms of an answer, actually. So I would say that as long as humans have been in North America, they have interacted with turkeys. And the paleontological, the fossil evidence really supports that. When you start to look at the specific archaeological context and the direct or indirect dating methods that support those contexts, we see that humans, indigenous peoples who were interacting with turkeys, as earliest as about 10,000 years ago, at least that's the earliest kind of direct evidence. So we see Turkey showing up in some archaeological context. These are really early, you know, sort of hunter-gatherer groups that were moving and subsisting through the landscape. But then the really critical period for understanding Turkey domestication occurs roughly about 2,000 years ago. And I say that's the critical period because that's the earliest evidence we have for domesticated forms that were domesticated by Native American groups within North America.

That's when the earliest evidence shows up. So we start to see all sorts of things happen. in and around that time and then really for the last 2,000 years, just a kind of fluorescence of this relationship between these groups and post-contacts as Europeans contacted indigenous societies here in North America. That changed a lot of things as well. That influenced quite a bit. But we see sort of, I would just say, this really long-term relationship between humans and turkeys within North America, really since these first peoples in North America arrived. And again, the continent of North America. It's been peopled for over 13,000 years. But Spanish colonization after the Columbus

arrival in the 1490s introduced several million European settlers into the ecosystem here, just over the next 300 years. And it just ignited this fire of migration, colonization, and genocide that would forever change the ecology and the cultural makeup of the lands here. For more on how that works, you can see our two episodes on genocide with expert doctor. Dr. Dirk Moses. Or are various ologies episode covered by indigenous scholars, including Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer and indigenous ethnobotanist. Dr. Lee Joseph, we'll link those in the show notes. Now, we also discuss indigenous relationships to birds in the recent Strigaformology episode All About Owls with Dr. R. J. Gutierrez and our feathered plumology episode with Dr.

Allison Schultz. Speaking of. And are the feathers used for flesching a lot or ornamentally, like Do you find any evidence of that or is it mostly cooking stuff? Oh, yeah. So the early evidence we have, archaeologically speaking, for humans and turkeys interacting, it seems like they were not being consumed. We see maybe individual turkeys showing up in some archaeological sites. We see perhaps turkey feather blankets that are showing up or mummified turkeys that are showing up, but really kind of sporadic, low abundance.

We see this evidence for humans interacting with turkeys, keeping them in counterfeit, We see that there's some sort of important, for lack of a better word, ceremonial relationship. So there's a site in Arizona, and they found a hide bag buried in the subfloor of habitation space, and then that hide bag was full of turkey beards, sort of these feathers that come out of a turkey chest. So those are from Tom, so from these male turkeys. So again, you start to see bits and pieces of evidence highlighting that humans are interacting with turkeys. They're keeping turkeys, and they, turkeys are starting to fill a role. within these indigenous societies. But then later in time, turkeys continue to have this very

special role in those societies, but they increase in their abundance. All of a sudden, you start to see large habitation sites, multi-hundred room pueblos with plazas. You see turkey pins. You see people that are clearly eating turkeys. So turkeys with cut marks, turkey bones that are burned. You'll see sort of large trash midden deposits that are chock full of turkey bones. So clearly there's kind of this change over time in how turkeys were used, or maybe, the birds begin to take up more of sort of this human space in different ways. It's remarkable. And just as I know, I know that you were trying to visualize a beard on a bird. I get it. You're thinking like a schnauzer or a grandpa. But think of those chin wisps and then just move them down a little bit.

And then move them down a little further and then down a little bit more. So yeah, a turkey beard nowhere near its head. I don't know who named it that. But it's like a tassel of thick black hair. that sprouts right out of the sternum area. And you can discern the age of a tom by how long its beard is. Some hens also have beards. Nobody knows why, which is just another wonderful example of gender nonconformity and nature in case you need to shut anyone up about it. But yes, according to the 1980 paper, Basketmaker Caves in the Praer Rock District, Northeastern Arizona, published in the anthropological papers of the University of Arizona, researchers found these little bags. They were made out of whole animal hide. So picture a rodent that's been skinned, heads removed,

feet still dangling on, but the whole thing's turned inside out like a little fur-lined coin purse and then stuffed with turkey beards. Perhaps it's like a memento. So that was written about in 1980, but Silers 2021 paper contextualizing ancestral Pueblo turkey management in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory in that he revisits this broken flute case. And so that he revisits this broken flute cave and rights of other turkey evidence that included a basket, approximately two-thirds filled with turkey beathers, some cordage wrapped with split turkey feathers, and possible turkey bone alls or whistles. And again, anthropologists and archaeologists think that while humans were corraling turkeys into their homes or other structures to domesticate them,

it may have been just to keep turkeys out of their hair and just feeding them scraps instead of letting them tear up the ground around them. So Turkey is domesticating us. What you thought you knew about turkeys is incorrect. We have all been played. You know, post-contact then, did turkeys start getting shipped all over and people saying, you get a lot of bird for the buck? Like, and did they start proliferating just in the last couple hundred years? Yeah. So we did a couple of things post-contact that really dramatically altered how we understand turkeys today. One is that, When the Spanish arrived in North America, really in Mesoamerica, they encountered turkeys in Mesoamerica.

And I should add quickly that there were two different independent domestications of turkeys within North America. So one within the American Southwest, but also within Mexico, in the Yucatan, there's also a different domestication event of Turkey. So different groups within North America, different indigenous groups, clearly interacting with these birds. But once the Spanish arrived, they brought some turkeys with them back to Europe. turkeys and interbred for a couple hundred years, a few hundred years.

Then the early colonists to North America brought back the descendants of those captive domesticated birds that the Spanish had brought over back to North America. Yeah, as if it was something unique that they just only knew about, right? That tracks. Yep, exactly. And so the farm raised turkeys today during Thanksgiving, if you go to the store, any of those turkeys, right? Genetically, those turkeys are from the stock of turkeys that was brought back by the sort of early colonists to North America. So they're really, when you're eating a Thanksgiving

turkey, unless you have someone of your family who killed and hunted a wild turkey, you're probably eating a descendant of these Mayan domesticated turkeys that the Spanish brought with them to Europe and then back again to North America. And then why are the domesticated ones? Why do they have white feathers typically instead of this beautiful brownish model color. Do we know? Is it just for pillow making? I have a guess, you know, because of our kind of industrialized nature of how we're breeding birds these days, same with chickens. My guess is that, you know, if you think about turkey plumage and their feathers and what those feathers are for, especially display, you know, mating. I suspect that when you have these large-sized kind of industrial scale farms, perhaps

turkeys have been further sort of selected as they've been bred over time to lose some of those characteristics. I don't really know if that's true at all, but, you know, say you've got a turkey farm with thousands and thousands of turkeys, if they're going to start displaying or, you know, and often, right, they're not keeping tombs with all those hens. But it's probably easier for some of those sort of large farms to keep the birds as consistent and as non-diverse as possible, would be my guess. So I looked into this and is sad and it's gross, but this breed, the broad-breasted white, has been selectively bred to mature really fast, like commercial chickens. And they're harvested after just four or five months.

And then they've bred them to have white feathers because it leaves the skin looking smoother when the bird is plucked. So any stray feathers don't stick out like black whiskers on something you're about to eat. Because heaven forbid, we're confronted with the notion that this animal was recently alive. I love turkeys. But I eat turkey. I'm all crossed up about it. More on that in a minute.

When it comes to learning about turkeys for you, like, what's been something that's been interesting turkey hole to go down? Eggs. Turkey eggs and their eggshells. Tell me everything you know. There's some really cool things with eggs. One research project many years ago that I got started on, and we've now sort of continued this research from different archaeological sites, is studying sort of the inner structure of egg shells. So birds, as they form these eggs, they have these mammillary cones inside the egg. So that when the embryo, that chick is developing within the egg, acids are being secreted. They're kind of breaking down these cone structures. And that's how they're reabsorbing some of those elements and critical nutrients. So calcium from the egg is what's helping build those very young birds' bones, right? So they have an archaeological site and you've got lots of eggshell fragments. You can look at those under a scanning electron microscope, really sort of high-powered microscopy, and you can actually see physical changes

that tell you something about, oh, I can look at this eggshell and tell you a turkey laid that egg and it was immediately cracked open. So perhaps they were eating the egg, perhaps they were using the albumin, you know, as a binder and paints. Or perhaps that turkey was allowed to hatch because they wanted to increase their flock size and here we go. This is this physical evidence that we can see in eggshells. So turkey eggs, I think, are remarkable for what they can tell us and what information is kind of hidden within them. Are they huge? Yeah, they're larger than chicken eggs and it's probably one of the reasons we don't eat turkey eggs on an industrial scale today, just their size. And turkey hens are, they're infrequent layers of eggs. So they're not

as prolific as chickens. Turkey hens will, they'll usually lay clutches of eggs, maybe around 10, roughly, give or take, usually about an egg per day. And sometimes they'll have multiple clutches within sort of a year, but usually it's about one clutch in the wild, at least one clutch per year. Have you ever eaten a turkey egg? I don't think I have. Now that you ask. You'd probably remember, right? Yeah, I don't think I have. So the deal with eggs is apparently turkeys make so few, and it costs so much to feed a big old turkey enough to lay eggs, and they don't lay a ton. So a dozen turkey eggs on the open market would cost like 40 bucks, which is much more than just buying one whole bird. So if you took those dozen eggs and you let them become birds, the dozen

birds are worth more on the farm than they are in the carton. That's the numbers of it. I've eaten a lot of turkey. In fact, you know, it's one of the interesting things. When you start studying something like a turkey. How many years had I eaten turkey without ever giving second thought to it? You'd crack open the wishbone, right, at Thanksgiving. You sort of had turkeys were just always kind of implicated in this sort of holiday or sort of these seasonal kind of traditions that we have, but I never really thought too much of them. And then all of a sudden I realized, oh, there was a whole world there of research that I didn't even know existed. Do you still eat turkey? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I do. But I don't, not a hunter. And I have respect for,

people who are, but I just don't think I could ever kill a turkey. That would be a challenge for me. In fact, my own family is really not thrilled with all of the turkeys similar, perhaps to your own family, that inhabit their yards, again, up here in Washington. Sometimes we get into sort of colorful debates about if those turkeys should be there, but again, I love them. So I think we should just let them be. There's the divide between I would eat it, but I wouldn't kill it. I think it's difficult for so many of us. And I go through the same thing because if I had to go up and kick that turkey in the stomach, I don't think I could do it. But if I had a turkey sandwich, I wouldn't bet an eye.

And I, I'm sure there are people studying the psychology of that. And that is a totally different episode that I'm super curious about. Yes. Okay. This is called The Meat Paradox. And for more on it, there's a 2014 paper titled The Psychology of Eating Animals in the Journal of the Association of the psychological sciences from three Australian scholars. And it begins that most people both eat animals and care about animals. Research has begun to examine the psychological processes that allow people to negotiate this, quote, meat paradox. And they say that to understand the psychology of eating animals, they've examined the characteristics of the eaters, people, they eaten animals, and the eating, the behavior. So I got to track those folks down and do an episode. There's also plenty

books on this as well from like omnivore's dilemma to eating animals and factory farming versus heritage breeds and smaller more humane farms to hunting and conservation and yeah again we need a whole episode on this i always think that it's impossible to be truly vegan because just driving on roads and living in houses and displacing animals for monoculture crops it's just a huge big conundrum in modern life. But veganism and vegetarianism certainly help and even cutting back on meat can make an impact. But this is certainly a topic that I want to explore both for myself and on the show and also just the psychology of it, the ecological impacts. Tofu is also good, though. I don't know. This is just like an impromptu journal entry about animal anguish. I'm sorry. Do you know where the wishbone is?

Oh, yeah. The furculum, it's a structure. I think that helps protect the larynx, the throats, kind of the vocal cords. Now my archaeological colleagues would just be so underwhelmed by my response there, but it's an interesting bone because of how it has sort of become embedded into our culture as this

component of, you know, enjoying turkey that you need to crack open their bones as well. I think it's also an interesting comment on the American ideal of a zero sum game where it's like you either win or you lose and that's it. Whoever's got

the bigger chunk. Yeah. And then your dreams and hopes are dashed if you don't. Yes, exactly. I remember my grandmother, very, very stoic, quiet woman who had 11 kids before the age of 30. Oh, wow. Catholic. But lived on a homestead.

And one Thanksgiving, we asked her if human beings, they have a wishbone. And she just said, well, I haven't cut up too many of those. That's all she said about that. Yeah, exactly. I'm not. Yeah. Okay, just a side note. This bone is called a furcula, and it is situated at the bottom of the neck.

It's analogous to your collar bones if they had been fused in the middle. And we didn't always break the wishbone and want the best for ourselves. So Etruscans of your, they considered chickens to be oracles of sorts, and they would sun-dry the wishbone after eating the turkey, and then they would simply touch it with their finger. while making a wish. And then the Romans took that tradition to the UK and America where they decided to make it a contest.

Because how can you be a have if there's not a have not? Now, in terms of like sexual dimorphism, what do the Tom's have for mating and why, like the neck tough? Oh, yeah. There's like a ponytail that comes out of a male's neck.

And then there's all just kind of gobbling things that I understand they're like mood ranking, they change color, like what kind of dimorphism? Yep. So several things. Male turkeys, tombs, as they're known, right, or larger in size. Not always twice as large, but, you know, there's maybe a third larger or more. But mostly tombs, male turkeys have this spur on their legs, so this sharp little kind of element. Male turkeys also more often than not in comparison to female turkeys have this turkey beard,

kind of this tuft of hair that comes out, again, all for display. They also have the waddle hanging down from the neck, and then male turkeys have this nude, sort of that fleshy bit that hangs over the nose. And of course, all of this is for display. It changes colors, trying to find mates. It can change size and sort of become enlarged. And, of course, you know, when you think of turkeys, right,

you think of the male turkeys, like similar to a peacock with their display feathers in sort of those tail feathers that are upright. So all of those elements are really to compete for mates, find a mate, all of that. Okay. So around the head area, you have a lot of wobbly business. And the frilly flesh around the bottom of the neck that looks like if a gourd were made of blood clots is called the car uncle, which seems a fitting name for it. The skin sail, the turkey neck, connecting the car uncle up to the bottom of the beak is

the du lap with a waddle. And then that dingle dangled dangly thing, most unsettling part, really. It looks like if emo bangs were made out of an appendix, that's called a snood. And lady turkeys, they have a little nub at a one, but males have several inches of snood, like a pendulum just in the middle of their face. Turkeys, especially the males, they can puff up their chest to become larger, look more hunky, but not as much as a sage grouse who can inflate himself with big old balloon knockers. I'm also curious. I'm also curious, why the grouse didn't become our turkey. You know, like why we're not eating grouse on, you know, certain holidays or something.

So when they're displaying, when they're kind of trotting around, they will make their feathers sort of puff out more, right? They'll use their wings. Of course, they're displaying their tail feathers. But your second question, thinking about, you know, why are grouse perhaps not? Do you want to, have you heard of the concept of sort of imprinting how animals can imprint? So this is something that goes to this long-term relationship with humans. Turkeys will imprint on humans, especially from a young age. So, you know, turkeys will identify very closely with humans. We can interpret this in several different ways from the archaeological record and the anthropological record because there are many stories.

There's a sort of well-known turkey girl story that exists within the Native American cultures, especially within the Southwest. I'd never heard of this turkey girl story, but I found a copy titled, turkey girl, a Zuni Cinderella story. And it's about a poor girl who lives on the mesa and she her her turkeys all day and she doesn't have much. She's dressed in rags and is dirty. People are not very nice to her. And she understands that all living creatures have feelings and she treats the turkeys really well, keeping them safe and returning them to the safety of their cages at night. And the turkeys love her back. And when there's a dance in town, she can't possibly go because she wears tattered, filthy rags. But the turkeys, they speak to her. And she just,

She's like, oh, hell yeah, you guys speak. And they're like, yeah, totally. And we will give you a makeover. And then they do. And then she goes to the dance. Everyone's like, dang, who's this haughty? She dances too long and the sunsets. And the turkeys are like, did she like, did ask for get us. And she's like, I did. And then she runs back to get the turkeys safely in their pens. But they're already out of there. They're like, I guess she's not coming back. And they're off. And she runs after them, but they just keep trotting ahead faster into the mountains. And she loses them forever. So I was. like that's sad. It turns out also that that's just one ending. That's the Zuni version. But according to the 2022 paper, turkeys befriendialism and tales of resistance during the Pueblo revolt era by the wonderful scholar Dr. Lydia D. McNeil. These folk tales had various endings. The Zuni, again, being one of the less optimistic ones. But Dr. McNeil writes in this paper, which is great. In some of the tales, the heroine finds her turkeys, and together they escape into, quote, a cave of shrines, into a better land. And in one Tewa tale, she escapes into a lake of emergence, but without her turkeys. And then in three other versions of the tale, her turkeys fly off in the four directions without her.

Perhaps they're returning to the wild, she says. But what's fascinating, Dr. McNeil argues, is that these turkey girl tales are, as she describes it, a previously overlooked expression of resistance to Spanish culture, and they reflect this repurposing of a Spanish Cinderella story that was told to Native children. They took that and they spun it. And Dr. McNeil writes that these tales reflect a spirit of pan-peblo ethnogenesis and resistance to Spanish religious conversion efforts, along with, you know, various degrees of hope for escape. And what's interesting is she knows that eight out of the nine Turkey Girl tales collected or traced to Pueblo groups that joined the revolt against colonists. And Dr. McNeil touches on the gendered role of turkey domestication among native peoples,

writing that women tended their domesticated and wild turkeys. They fed them a predominantly maize diet when possible and harvested their feathers for prayer sticks and ceremonial costumes and masks. Dr. McNeil looks at the folk tale of the turkey girl as a story of revolt against the pressures to separate from the land and culture. And she says that ancestral Puebloan women across these different ethnic groups experienced a close human turkey relationship,

which was characterized as a long-lasting social bond and says this was probably a result, at least in part of turkeys imprinting on their human caregivers. You know, you can imagine that a turkey might imprint upon someone. That turkey would follow you around. They're kind of yours. It's essentially more of a pet situation.

Like there's kind of a fundamental shift they see you and they experience you as a human in a different way. Sort of you're there to protect them. It's really interesting and it's something that turkeys do and some other animals and birds do. But I'm guessing that grouse probably don't do that same sort of thing. And so that might be why, you know, as we debate and think about why people domesticated turkeys, they might come around because they know there's food. They know there's a garden or a trash pile or something like that. but also they have this relationship with humans where they can handle us, we can handle them,

they like to be around. There's a barn that has some rescue turkeys and they, I'm told that they love cuddles. Like they are very cuddly, cuddly creatures. Yeah. Shout out to the gentle barn in Santa Clarita, California, where I hugged a turkey like a decade ago and I still think about it often. Also, sage grouse, sometimes you can imprint on humans when raised in captivity, but out there in the wild, you're off the hook. Nobody wants to eat you because you taste like sage. So keep eating the sage.

But how exactly have we dug into all this history over the years? Sometimes shittily. If you think back on the history of archaeology, right, especially early 20th century, you have a lot of exploitation, I think, is the right word, of native lands, of taking native lands. So in a lot of those early archaeological expeditions, a lot of that early work, all of these contexts were excavated, without any sort of indigenous consent or knowledge or involvement. That has changed through time for the better, which is wonderful. And it also has meant that the ways in which archaeologists, including myself, kind of collaborate with Native communities, really shapes the way that we investigate questions, but also ask those questions. So I think about this sometimes. They're not

the same federal or state laws that, say, focus on animal remains to the same. degree as human remains, right? But we know that turkeys are found in these same types of important burial context and internments that sometimes humans are as well. I mean, some of these birds were they were cared for in their life. I mean, a turkey in the wild lives between about three to five years, give or take. Sometimes turkeys can live upwards of 10 years or more. We see from the physical remains of turkeys in past Native American sites that they had healed broken bones. And they're healed in a way that shows that they survived that and they were cared for long-term in life. So they had this very special relationship, something again that you might think about with

our relationship with our pets today, right? So if you're a hunter today, and this is one of the really fascinating things with DNA, you know, turkeys in the early 20th century, they had been overhunted, over-exploited by the, you know, westernized colonial descendant population here within North America, right? So their numbers drop to, oh gosh, 20,000, 30,000, roughly something like that in the wild. So they were significantly overhunted. Today there's millions of turkeys, right? But that's through successful repopulation,

revitalization efforts for these birds. But turkeys from places like the American Southwest were brought to other areas, especially of Western North America, to repopulate and to sort of create these flocks to help their populations. And if we remember back that Native American people's domesticated turkeys, especially in the American Southwest,

if we focus just on that area, some of those domesticated turkeys went feral, essentially went wild and interbred with the wild turkeys. So the DNA from those domesticated turkeys lives on in wild populations today. And then those wild populations were moved to other, especially Western states. So you might see a turkey today in Washington and California or elsewhere. That turkey might have a genetic signal, sort of this legacy relationship to the Pueblo peoples, the Native American peoples of the Southwest, who originally domesticated those birds. several thousand years ago. So it is a complex interaction. I've got so many questions.

Speaking of questions, needing to be asked. My listeners know you're coming on and they submitted questions. Awesome. May I run through some. Oh yeah. Lightning roundy. Okay, cool. So patrons, they have great questions. What would we do without them? We would have half a show. But before we get to that half of the show and ask your questions about turkey vibes and brains and flim flam and politics, Let's send some cash to a cause of theologist's choice. And this week, Dr. Conrad selected the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, which is creating a living museum exhibiting the history and accomplishments of the Pueblo people of New Mexico, providing education programs that teach children about Pueblo culture and core values and connect them with Pueblo traditions and conserve thousands of works of art and artifacts from great Pueblo artists. So you can learn more about them at Indian Pueblo.org. and thank you to sponsors of the show for making that possible.

Okay, let's peck away at your questions. This first one is overdue. A few people wanted to know, Melissa Kane, Lindsay Mixer, Jason Lowenthal, Claire, and RJ Dejj. RJ Dejge asked, why are they such weird fuckers? And Jason Lowenthal said, why don't turkeys give a fuck? Lindsay asked, why are they just like that? There's so much all of the time.

And Lindsay asked, no brain but maxed out sass. Are they sassy? Do they have one peanut M&M in their skull? What's going on? It's a great question because I am convinced that that sassiness, you know, those turkeys, they understand us and they are resilient. I think that with whatever's going on up there in a turkey brain, they know just the right degree to annoy us, the degree that we'll keep them around. They can keep eating and kind of hanging out with us. I think they're quite clever in that way. Turkey's, I got your back. Are their brains really the size of a pea? No.

They're more like a marble or a very small walnut. But science writer and PhD chicken psychologist, a good friend, Dr. Jason Colton, wrote in a 2013 scientific American article titled, Nothing to Gobble at, Social Cognition in Turkeys, that if an outsider turkey wanders into the wrong side of the forest, feathers would fly and beaks would pack. But domestic turkeys are birds of a different feather, he writes, and cites literature showing that even domestic turkeys can distinguish who's in and out of their social group. And a 2021 article in Salon titled, Stupid Turkeys, scientists say that the unfairly maligned bird may actually be stuffed with smarts. Quotes several other ornithologists, including Dr. Allen Crackauer, who told the outlet that

turkeys may not have the problem-solving skills of crows and ravens, but he says, I'm reluctant to call them stupid. They can survive in all sorts of habitats, including cities, and make use of a huge range of different types of food. They have to do all this while navigating a complex social world. I think that if you are a big, juicy, ground dweller who can't fly, you better have a little attitude. Those are the ones that survived. Yeah. You know, I think the ones without as much moxie, I should say, probably became dinner. Emily Rubel wanted to know, they said one year I saw a female with teenager and baby turkeys and was convinced I was seeing a second brood that summer. You mentioned that they don't lay a lot of eggs, but do they typically mate, like once a year, do you think they're out there making more babies?

It's possible. Yeah. Yeah, it's possible. Sometimes they'll have multiple clutches per year. So that would not surprise me. And it really, it kind of, goes down to the resources at their disposal. Do they have enough resources to sustain a whole another clutch or the inclination to do so? So yeah, it's possible. Lindsay Mixer wanted to know, have you ever seen Thanksgiving? It's a B-movie. The ghost of the first turkey ever killed for Thanksgiving comes back to get revenge, absolutely idiotic movie. Have you seen it? I've got to look that up. Got to look at it. I've never seen it before, but that's thank you. Please thank you for that recommendation. We'll roll. some, we'll roll some trailer audio.

There's no such thing as an evil turkey. There's... No such thing as an evil turkey. Oh, wait. I lie. Patron Lindsay Mixer, unfortunately, made me aware of this 2008 film, which had a budget of $3,500. And if you like vintage cinema with a lot of local actors who are blood relatives of the director and a turkey puppet that seeks...

Revenge and speaks English, as well as a lot of unsensitive language that would be best described as pre-Twitter you can have at it. Now, for a different set of goosebumps, did you ever see a video online with turkeys who were following each other in a circle? Did the 50,000 people send you that? Like, turkeys were following each other. And it seemed maybe around a dead turkey or maybe it was like a pentagram. I don't remember. But definitely we'd look like we got it. an accidental window into the Illuminati of turkeys, but they were circling each other. It is the craziest thing I've ever seen. Turkeys walking in a circle around a dead cat in the middle of the road.

And I'm like, I don't know if that's just like wild. It's bringing back some memories now. I remember when I first watched it, I thought, oh, okay, what's going on? You know, how are the stars aligned right now? But it doesn't surprise me. You know, some birds will, birds understand, especially turkeys, when, you know, other birds die. So they'll kind of inherently understand that once a bird dies, right, they could carry disease or there could be some bad things that come from them. So they'll try and kind of bury

them or push them away. That will sometimes happen in backyard chicken pins, that type of thing. So yeah. So that video hit the internet nearly 10 years ago, as did a tidal wave of think pieces and speculative reports, including a vice article titled, Dear God, why are these turkeys circling a dead cat? and the NPR piece, turkeys circling a dead cat are probably wary, not working dark magic. And various biologists and ornithologists were reached for comment, and they offered explanations like maybe the turkeys are alarmed, or that one turkey was the leader and was keeping one eye with monocular vision on the dead cat while also maintaining a distance and all the other turkeys just kind of fell into line. Some reporters cited other videos of turkeys caught in caholes around trinkering a distance. trees or doing a ring around the rosy, around a tombstone. And other experts said, I don't really know what's going on here. It's weird. And again, this was early 2017. And one Washington Post headline

unrelated read that we've, quote, slipped into another dimension in the Trump era. But yeah, even bird experts got the willies. You know, I'm curious. It's so funny. I'm seeing so many questions from the Bay Area, and that's where I'm from. I live in L.A. now. But a few people asked about urbanization, and Sarah Joser wanted to know, like, if you studied domestication and living among humans, but, you know, a lot of people wanted to know about nuisance turkey populations or just how they live among people. So, well, does that ever play into some of the work you do, like how they can kind of get along around human populations? Yes, yeah, definitely. Probably the easiest way to think about it is if you look at their records over time,

especially some of the earlier records from give or take 2,000 years ago, human groups, indigenous peoples were quite mobile at that time. So they were moving around the landscape quite frequently. So we see that as people start to slow down, they start to build these larger areas where they're living more year round, all of a sudden, turkeys are there. Why, hello there? I suspect, just like we see turkeys today, even if you didn't have a domesticated, turkey and you had a village site. Turkeys would probably come on by. You know, they're going to come by

trot on over, gobble, say hi, look for some scraps, probably annoy people. You know, I mean, that's, so the same type of behaviors that they have today. So today we so easily see them as that nuisance because they're, they're bugging us, they're jumping on cars, they're getting in our way. You know, it's sort of this fast-paced, right? Everything's happening. But if we just stop and enjoy them, they're really remarkable birds. Oh, I love them. Robert Iheart did ask, who let the turkeys loose in California?

When I was a boy, you couldn't get within a county mile of a wild turkey now in a residential neighborhood. I've had as many as 40 turkeys in my yard at one time. When I found one on top of my car, I declared war. So this person has to get them off their car. I will say I saw a turkey pecking at my car once because it, saw itself in the reflection and wanted to start a fight. Yeah. I cared more about the turkey than my car because I was like,

my car's going to be fine, but I was like, no, he comes in peace. That's you. Exactly. You're safe, my little baby. The call's coming from inside the house. I just feel like when else do you get to see such a large, wild animal? Yeah. It's so exciting to see them at all.

But I'm wondering, too, about in the wild, or domestically. And maybe you saw evidence of this too in archaeological sites in terms of calling, but Anna Ward, A.J. Protect Terran's Lives and Andrew McVeigh and Mayer all wanted to know about disease. Like AJ asks, have Turkey's been suffering from avian flu outbreaks? Did you ever see evidence of that? Oh, yeah. So I've referred a couple times to the domesticated turkeys, right, in the American Southwest. These were independently domesticated, but they were also kept isolated. We know this from the genetics and also from the physical archaeological evidence. Those turkeys were kept isolated from the wild, probably wild Mariams turkeys that were

hanging around. We also know from the DNA that indigenous peoples were exploiting both domesticated turkeys and wild turkeys at the same time. A lot of different reasons for that. One might have been to just sort of add some genetic diversity into breeding those flocks. But to get back to this question about disease, I mentioned this because the Pueblo domesticated Turkey, it really disappears in physical form right around the time of Spanish contact within the American Southwest and Mexican Northwest. For your listener who asked about California, we have introductions to think for that. That's why there's so many.

They were introduced. They loved it out there. It's a great environment and they can proliferate. But we suspect that a combination of disease, perhaps introduced diseases for turkeys or just the real tragedy of the diseases that killed off Native American populations within North America, all of those diseases. And yes, the smallpox, flu, measles, typhus, among other epidemics post-contact, are devastating. Some sources reporting up to 95% of indigenous people in the North America's, up to 100 million

people died as a result of infections after colonization. And even today, healthcare access, systemic racism means that in the COVID- pandemic, for example, black, indigenous, and Latino Americans had much higher mortality rates than white people. Now, as for turkeys, the poultry industry reeled from bird flu deaths with over two million turkeys killed or cold last year, five times more than 2024. That risk, though, is not the one on many of your minds. In terms of flim flam, oh my gosh, so many people, Sarah Jozer, Michael Croce, Van Schell, Bopee, Kate F, H.R. Puff and stuff. Kylie Kat, Allison D. Lauren Kent, Mouse Paxton, Christy. This is insane.

Christy, Alberti, Aaron Armitage, Sarah, Vanderklead. Okay, wanted to know if you have heard about turkeys drowning in the rain. Is it true? Kylie Katz, turkeys can drown by looking up to the sky when it's raining. Have you heard of this? Okay, I never have. And I don't know. that's a good or bad thing. Like, perhaps that's embarrassing. Turkey goss. I'm gagged. I had never heard this.

Allison D. said my dad worked on a turkey farm for a season or two when he was younger. He has a wacky story. I don't know if I can believe. File immediately under flim flam. He claims that whenever it rained, some of the turkeys would look up this guy to see what was happening

and they would drown from, I guess, inhaling rain drops. Wow. What is happening here? Will they actually drown from looking up at the rain? Maybe that was like in a Pixar movie or something. something that people have just ran with it. I don't know. I'd never heard this before. It's a great question. You know, turkeys are, they need water. They have to drink water.

About a quart roughly per day. Wow. Turkeys also are very much associated with water within Native American communities and some of the iconographic representations of turkeys. What I can say, I think, with some confidence is that wild turkeys are not dying in large numbers by drowning when it rains. That's a good point. Because it rains up in Northern California all the time, where my family lives. And it's not like they just see mounds of dead turkeys every time it rains. So yeah, just a big old load of turkey shit. Now, if you see one looking up in the rain, perhaps they're just showing off their face danglers or they're just enjoying the vibe.

You needed to know everything about them though. Allie Brown, AJGC, Alexander Roth, Julia loves Fun Facts, Aticapelo, Allie and Nicole Kleinman, Macon, McGin Walker, Ricky G, Leaple, Leigh, Leigh, G, Leigh, and Arela Zarina, who said, I look at a turkey for a little more than 10 seconds, and I'm questioning my existence. Like, what is it with the red thing? We did get a lot of people ask about the waddle. Lauren Cooper, what's the dangle for? What does it feel like?

What's up with the gobbler? I love that Caitlin Alice said, Loki don't know how I feel about it. Hannah E. called it an aesthetic travesty that is the waddle. Do males and females have a waddle or only males? They both have the waddle, but the snood kind of hanging over the nose they do not. And I can really empathize and resonate with a lot of your listeners because it's, you know, when you see them, you think, oh yeah, they look a little like, ooh, all right.

Yeah, they're hanging out there. So yeah, there's the car uncle, which is the barnacle things on the throat. And then there's the under chin waddle. And then there's that sexy snood, which is a nubbin on a hen and a long drip of bubble gum on a tom. And since turkeys can't sweat, but there are always cloaked in a duvet of their own making, these weird dangles can release some heat for them while also bringing the heat because when excited or dressed to impress, that snooed and waddle can flood with blood and turn a deep, deep hot red. But when scared, it can blanch to pink or blue or white, sort of. So I got deep into it. And in a 2014 paper, Biomimetic virus-based colorometrics sensors, researchers looking to biomimicry as sensors for explosive materials discovered that this

gobbler waddle is composed of a lot of collagen and a lot of blood vessels. And when the turkey feels chill or happy or is sexing you up, the collagen tightens up and the blood rushes in creating that kind of scarlet transformation. When it's scared, the collagen bundles expand and the blood vessels are underneath all of that kind of obscured and the light scatters to that white or light blue. And the paper notes that these dramatic makeovers are the reason why in some Asian countries like South Korea or Japan, turkeys are called seven-faced birds. But it's just amazing, right? If we think about the evolution and diversity of all these different morphological features and kind of what they're for. I thought Daniela Napolitano had an interesting question too. They said

they were just down in southern Arizona birdwatching. We saw a ton of wild turkeys while we were there. Someone told us that the wild turkey is super important in the history of North America, especially for arrow fletching. And that's one reason they were prized birds. But do you ever find any, like, evidence of feathers? Are there feathers just have a toughness that is kind of superior? They seem like if I've ever found one.

Yeah. So the feathers were so critically important, both for the coloration and kind of how they looked, right? But also, downy feather blankets, you know, there's been a lot of research on turkey feather blankets because turkey feather blankets have been discovered in some of these very arreid archaeological sites. And some of the very interesting research that's come out of that is shown that you can collect from about anywhere between four to ten turkeys, enough feathers to create one of these blankets. But those blankets have about 12,000 feathers on them. Wow. That's something that's kind of common.

So we think about the reasons, right? Why did humans domesticate these birds? Well, being able to have a bird that you can keep alive for many years. You can feed it basically what you're eating. They might really like you. They might imprint on you so you can have this special relationship with them. And as an added benefit, you get these feathers for lots of different purposes. So like where am I going to find an expert on arrows in Fletching and Mesoamerican and Southwestern weaponry?

Oh, my phone. There's this past guest. Wonderful, wonderful, Angelourobletto, who's an experimental archaeologist and one of the global experts on this spear-chucking device you need to know about, which is an Atlattle. And we have a whole episode with him. It's so good. And he was on hand to answer my text earlier today because he's the best. I was like, hey, what's the role of turkey feathers and fletching? And he said, yeah, turkey feathers are some of the most commonly used feathers across North America. And other feathers used for fletchings on arrows are eagle, hawk, falcon, buzzard, flicker, and sometimes owl, but that's very tribe-dependent. He says some tribes associate negative omens with owls. And you can see our strigiformology owl episode with Dr. Gutierrez for more on that lore. We really go into it.

And historically, Angelo continues, there's indications that some tribes have used different feathers for different purposes. For example, turkey feathers for hunting arrows and eagle, falcon, hawk feathers for war arrows because of the predator prey distinction. And he also says another interesting note when archaeologists find arrows or atlattle darts, usually all of the feather has been rotted away except for the little bit of the quill that's wrapped under sinew, protecting it from rot. So often the researchers are trying to identify these feather types based on a tiny fragment of the feather under a microscope. So experimental archaeologists like him are working on this kind of stuff. And again, his episode on atlattles is fascinating. We also have a whole episode on raptor birds.

And I will say because of all the turkey parades through my family's yard, I have found many turkey feathers and they're so beautiful. They're like brown and cream stripes, iridescent tips, and they have a really hardy structure. And I've taken some of them off the ground and I stick the inside tube of a pen in the hollow shaft of the feather. And then I write with it just to give my day a little whimsy and my life meaning because 2026. What even is it? And yes, Siler echoes that with some domestic and cultural uses for the turkey feathers. Maybe there's just a functional characteristic. You want to construct and build a warm blanket. Maybe there's a more significant ceremonial purpose with some of those feathers. So we see all of those trajectories and how turkeys are used, both from the archaeological evidence and then certainly from modern day indigenous communities in kind of the ethno-historic record.

I wonder if they imprinted on just individuals and then they hated other people that were living in that community. Possible. Kate with Kat's first-time question asker said, I lived in Davis during my undergrad years. That's Northern California. And we had some notorious wild turkeys that would migrate through town each year, wreaking havoc on pedestrians. Local police put up posters warning people to cross the road and avoid them at all possible opportunity. But I saw many people chased and pecked at for simply walking down the sidewalk. Yeah. Do they tend to get territorial, do you think?

Yeah, and especially the Tom's because they're out there trying to find mates, right, and kind of keep their little flocks together. So, you know, turkeys are probably pushing it at this point. They might not fully understand that. And again, we have ourselves to blame. We introduced or sort of reintroduce these turkeys back into some of these environments. And we know from the paleontological record there are turkeys from the Librea Tar pits. There's actually probably kind of a specific California species or subspecies, you know, up for debate.

But understanding that evolutionary history, there used to be turkeys in California, then they essentially went locally extinct. But then we brought them back in, mostly for hunters and other things like that. So, you know, yeah, someone asked about that. Hi, Ali, John, Geis, in California, where we are overrun with wild turkeys. my understanding is they were brought to California in the 50s by hunters. I'm wondering if that is accurate. Okay, stop.

So there was a wild California region turkey. It's called the Malagros, Californicus. And yes, it's been extinct for 10,000 years. So the turkeys that I love, the ones I see all the time, are an entirely different species. They're essentially feathered feral cats. Or if you listen to our Columbidology episode with Rosemary Moscow, they're like pigeons. Say it isn't so. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, there was a big effort at the federal scale to reintroduce and try and protect and kind of revitalize these turkey populations that have been significantly overhunted and kind of habitat destruction, that story, right, that existed for many different animals during that time period.

There is a video that some of your listeners might be interested in. I believe there was something like a turkey cannon that was developed. It's a cannon that shoots a giant net because they needed to figure out ways to capture these turkeys. turkeys sort of in, you know, sufficient enough numbers. There's a portion of my memory that is sort of visualizing this video I watched at some point. But things like that, you know, they had to sort of find ways to collect these turkeys and they collected them from the different subspecies and different populations throughout the United States and then just transplanted them into different areas. Washington, California are kind of infamous for that because they're so resilient and they've just proliferated in those environments. I had no idea. It's so funny too because being from Northern California myself, where we have a lot of turkeys, I thought there were this

many turkeys all over. I thought everyone had 40 turkeys trying to mate with their car bumper. I didn't know that was just a perk of living in Northern California. I miss them living in Southern California. I mean, whenever I see one, I'm just thrilled. I'm so thrilled. It's like a parade going through the driveway. Exactly. And I have to send you this video of them kissing. They're definitely fighting, but they do look like they've been caught canoodling, which is amazing. You can stay tuned for a song at the end, which was written and performed by Jared Sleeper.

And yes, males do hold each other's beaks in their mouths. They're locked in this undulating battle for control to establish rank. Sometimes they nibble each other's fleshy little snood. and the hens and the flock watch on. Like it's a mud wrestling competition. That's also a presidential election. Is there any flim flam about turkeys that you really want to bust? Or are there any pop cultural turkeys that you feel like really get it right?

Or any miss that you're like, that is not true. Okay. Two things come immediately to mind. Oh, it may be a third one. That's here. Okay. So the first one, I think my most favorite kind of reference, in pop culture to a turkey is in Christmas vacation.

Catherine, this turkey tastes half as good as it looks. I think we're all in for a very big treat. Save the neck for me, Clark. When, of course, they're making the Christmas turkey, and it, like, explodes open in this. Say no more. No, I know exactly what you mean. Just remarkable, you know, and for a long time,

I thought, oh, someday I've got to write something about how that turkey, the DNA, it's probably related, right, to these indigiously domesticated turkeys. And, oh, you can tell by the structure of the bones and we know from their domestication is probably a hen that they were chopping it. Right. There's all these different things that that turkey just kind of represents. So that is the one I always think about. But I should let you describe that. I said, say no more when I should have said, say everything. It is that a turkey comes out of the oven. They go You cut the turkey. Yeah.

How would you describe it? I think it's been clearly overcooked. If I'm remembering right from the movie, it's sort of overcooked. It kind of explodes and deflates at the same time, right? It makes this hissing noise. I mean, for a while, I wanted to track down, like, who from the props department could tell me. Like, how did they build that turkey? Did they, you know, what was the, you know, there's a lot of ways you can go down that path.

It was a beautifully browned, crisp skin. And then when they cut open into it, it was hollow. It was like hollowed smoke and tendons and bones as though the inside had been cremated. Exactly. So I will look up who the prop person was. Okay. So his favorite pop culture reference to a turkey is this indelible culinary scene from National Lampoon's Christmas vacation.

So memorable. I looked up every person on IMDB in special effects and props, and I could find no info on the making of. I googled them all. I found obituaries. I found LinkedIn's. I found no mention of the making of this bird. So then I called the wonderful LA video rental store videos. And I rented a copy of the Blu-ray of this film, which had commentary from various actors and the director. And I fast forwarded to this scene to get some BTS of how this dummy bird was crafted and what hydraulics or robotics or smoke were necessary to pull it off. And when I got to that scene, all I got were the actors just sitting in silence other than laughing. One of them said poof when the smoke came up. So you guys, I tried.

I tried so hard. If you know someone who knows someone who made that incinerated turkey and Christmas vacation, like reach out. I'm not going to be sleeping until I no more. So I always think about that one. But the one thing to correct, which, and I feel bad being the bear of bad news here. So this Benjamin Franklin story, if you dive into that record, it's essentially not true. So he wrote to, I believe it was his daughter. And he was kind of just ruminating on turkeys.

and he was describing maybe as a joke. Again, you can read the letter today, but he basically described how I think one of the state seals, maybe it was of Connecticut, but that it sort of looked not like an eagle, but like a turkey. So he sort of made this joke. But he never actually said it should be or pitched that idea. Now, several hundred years later,

I think it's an amazing idea, right? I mean, what a remarkable bird from North America, domesticated here in North America. it should have a very important place. You know, nothing against eagles, also amazing birds, and they have this significance, but turkeys, gosh, I think we need to revitalize their kind of experience here. It'd be wonderful to see. I'm all for good turkey PR.

Yes, exactly. So that's a massive flim flam. How do you feel about the one turkey being pardoned every year? To me, it only highlights all the turkeys that didn't get pardoned. And also, the modern issue of who gets pardoned in America is contentious. And it is, you're like one turkey gets pardoned, but you can get pardoned for much worse offenses than being delicious. Do you ever track who's getting pardoned? So, yeah, I track that.

And every year, I have the same sort of experience that goes through my mind, which is I see the videos. I see those turkeys that are being pardoned. I think, oh gosh, if only anyone realized sort of the deep connections, you know, across kind of space and time, right? They're probably, again, kind of related to these Meso-American, Mayan domesticated Turkey. So I often think about how we almost take turkeys for granted. They just exist in our consciousness here. They're tied to all of these certain events in time. Thanksgiving in and of itself, it came around during the Civil War as a way to sort of reunite the country, right? And so And turkeys happen to be, as the story goes, kind of during that time involved in the common recipes.

Correct. It was a PR thing to manipulate the nation into coming together around a false narrative celebrating, I guess, the genocide of indigenous people. So if overcooking your turkey does not ruin Thanksgiving this year, you can let that factoid do it. What's the hardest part about being a turkey researcher, being someone who, do people ask you how to cook it come November? You know, sometimes I have had that question, and I have never been great with cooking a turkey because I always, oh gosh, you know when you get a store-bought turkey, there's the little... The giblets? Yes, yeah. I have cooked them within and forgotten to pull them out several times. So I apologize.

That's there. But, you know, probably the hardest thing, I think it's that I know that because not more of us are studying turkey, so this is a pitch to everyone out there and start studying turkey. there's so much that we might not learn about them or we haven't studied yet. Like, right, I talk about the DNA. That's a huge part of understanding so much about their domestication. That's just the mitochondrial DNA. We have not yet been able to, I say we, but sort of archaeologists, geneticists, we haven't studied the nuclear DNA yet, right?

So we don't really understand that complete story of their genetics and their domestication. So that's what I think about a lot. You know, you can kind of sit there and imagine different components of turkeys and you start to realize, oh, there might not be a way to answer that question or research that question. We just might not have the capabilities now. I was going to say a lot of the turkey experts out there, like I'm an expert at telling you how to kill a turkey in the wild. And I'm like, well, what about the DNA? What about the, what are those giblets? What about your favorite thing about turkeys?

Oh, my favorite thing about turkeys. I think it goes back to maybe how we started this conversation. I love that they'll gobble at you if you gobble back at them. You know, it's so distinctive, right? I have stopped, slammed on the brakes, rolled down my window to gobble at some turkeys that I saw on the side of the road. Like, just so excited, like, just can't contain myself. So I love that. I think that that's to be able to have what you can think of as like a conversation, right?

It's not a conversation. But you get that response from those animals. animals from those birds. I think it's just another line of evidence, another component of this that makes them really interesting to us humans. It definitely feels like going, hey, and if we're going, hey, it feels very much like Norm walking into cheers. Exactly. I feel very privileged to have had a conversation with a turkey. Even if they were yelling at me, I feel privileged to be acknowledged by a turkey. It's an honor to be acknowledged. They say, the turkey in me sees the turkey and you. That's beautiful. It is. It really is.

So ask archaeological people, asinine questions, because what the hell did I know about turkeys before this? Not enough. Not as much as I thought. Thank you so much to Siler for being on. What a wonderful guest. And folks, go study turkeys. Have more questions. Thank you so much to Siler for being on. And we're going to have a link in the show notes to our webpage for this episode, and that has links to studies and videos and pictures and everything. There's also a link in the show notes to the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center. We are at Ologies on Instagram of Blue Sky, and I'm at Allie Ward on both. Smologies episodes are kid safe and classroom friendly, and you can find them for free in their own separate feed. Just look up Smologis on your

favorite podcast app. Join our Patreon at patreon.com slash ologies for just a dollar a month and ask theologist questions before we record. And thank you to Aaron Talbert, who adminzeeology's podcast Facebook group. Aveline Malick makes our professional transcripts. Kelly Ardweir does the website. Circling our calendar is scheduling producer Noel Dilworth. Keeping our snoods from blanching is managing director Susan Hale. Fine feathered friend Jake Chafee edits, as does lead editor, Mercedes-Maitland, who stitches our gobbles together. Nick Thorburn made the music. We waddle along too, and if you stick around, I tell you a secret. This week is a secret I've kept from my spouse. I have one of those like Oral B electric sonic toothbrushes. I've had it for like a year. My dentist

said, hey, we should all have this. And I've been using it. But for some reason, and I can't explain it, it's like stressful to have a tiny machine in your mouth. And I feel like it's like splatters. Like it sprays in my face. And it's harder to brush my invisible line with it. I feel like I get spots in the mirror. So I've been using it for like a year and year change, but I secretly have been using a regular toothbrush for like the last week or so. I just was at the drugstore and I was like, you know what? The world's a mess. I'm getting a regular toothbrush. But I hide it in the drawer because I'm worried that my husband Jarrett will be like, what's up with a regular toothbrush on the counter? But I just prefer to like just manually get all the teeth, brush my tongue. I don't know why I'm divulging

all this. Maybe one other person gets this. I need to do an autontology episode on teeth to find out if I'm like screwing myself over by not using the sonic one. Maybe there's something I can do to like that one more. I don't know. There are so many problems in the world and this is the biggest one, I think. Also as promised, please enjoy the song by the artist Jared Sleeper. You can find this and more songs on his Instagram, Jared underscore Sleeper. You can find him on Spotify or band camp. He's very talented.

Don't tell him that his wife has been hiding her toothbrush in the drawer. Okay. Bye-bye. Hackaderminology. Omiology. Cryptozoology. Litology. Meteorology.

The turkey solved the problems in most interesting ways. Yeah, they kiss. They kiss while they're fighting. So let's solve problems that we'll wrestle each other. Let's kiss while we're fighting. You can be my enemy, but also my mother. This is how we settle issues between one another.

Put your mouth inside of my mouth, please. Let's settle this like a couple of turkeys. We'll fight while we kiss.