He puffs himself up, gets red in the face, spreads his banded tail into a great fan and, with stiffened wing feathers rumbling as they scrape the ground, struts back and forth. The hen, more demurely colored than the tom, weighs about half as much and lacks the beard. There she lays about a dozen brown speckled eggs which hatch after 28 days of incubation. By late summer the young, now called poults, eat more and more vegetable matter. Throughout the rest of the year, they and their parents feed largely on acorns, nuts, weed seeds and grain.
Wild turkeys are great hikers and strong fliers.
They range so widely that several thousand acres of protected woodlands are required to satisfy the needs of a single flock. With the cutting of the forests and settlement of the land, followed by over-hunting, they were wiped out of this part of the country a hundred years ago. Ben Franklin proposed that the turkey be chosen as our national bird. Argonne National Laboratory, Division of Educational Programs, Harold Myron, Ph.D., Division Director.