Make way for turkeys: The Thanksgiving bird infiltrating city centers

NCAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts – Ask just about anybody in Harvard Square about the wild turkeys infiltrating their community and they’ll have a story to tell. They’ll likely have a few.

Cambridge, the roughly six square mile city across the river from Boston, is home to about 120,000 people and between 40 and 50 wild turkeys, according to city animal control officer Christina Correia.

A flock of more than seven of the birds has laid claim to a small triangular park wedged between bustling city streets near the historic center of this 400-year-old community. Most of the day, they graze on insects, leaves and seeds. Sometimes they’ll drink from the two water bowls bystanders have left them.

Other times, they get more aggressive: squawking and puffing their feathers at passersby, assaulting their reflections in car windows and chasing pedestrians (especially, it seems, those who look like postal workers).

They're not to be messed with, Correia said.

Still, some people love them.

Judith Tran, 72, has helped the animals cross the street. For the last year, she has bought special turkey food and special vitamins to feed the turkeys.

“They live with us, and they understand us,” Tran said, of the highly intelligent birds. “We’ve got to live with each other, and we need to live with the animals.”

Turkey business

The idea of turkeys and humans living amongst each other in downtown Cambridge – let alone Massachusetts – wouldn’t have been imaginable half a century ago.

Once abundant across the U.S., wild turkey populations began to dwindle in the late 1800s as settlers hunted the species with little restraint and destroyed their forest habitats. At one point, they were nearly extinct in the U.S.

The last native turkey in Massachusetts was killed in 1851, and none was found in the state for more than a century.

That was until the early 1970s, when, after years of unsuccessful attempts to restore the population, conservationists transported 37 birds from New York to the Berkshires, in western Massachusetts. A year later the turkey population had ballooned to 1,000.

Now, more than 30,000 turkeys are estimated to live in the state. The repopulation efforts have been dubbed a conservation success story; turkeys are so plentiful that they’re now Massachusetts’ official game bird.

David Scarpitti, the turkey and upland game project leader at the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, said the state has reached turkey “saturation,” with the birds now inhabiting every city and town, except the island of Nantucket.

But the rapid population rise has also pushed the birds to migrate from rural areas in the western and central parts of Massachusetts, to its more eastern suburban and urban areas – like Boston, Brookline and Cambridge ? looking for food and shelter.

As the turkeys have taken to their cosmopolitan lifestyles over the last decade, they’ve stirred up quite a commotion.

“They got used to people, and they got opportunistic with food,” said Correia, the animal control officer.

They’ve learned that bird feeders and manicured garden beds in densely packed neighborhoods make for ideal grazing grounds, Scarpitti said. And they’ve begun to thrive in downtown centers with small patches of green space, where people feed them, and fewer natural predators exist.

“When you end up with these high concentrations of turkeys mixed with a high human population, there's just a recipe there for conflict,” Scarpitti said.

Mixed emotions

Elsa Kennedy, 29, had only recently moved from Kentucky to the closely packed Boston neighborhood of Dorchester when she had her first run-in with one of the turkeys. She heard a squawking, screeching sound outside of her window one morning and found a brown feathered bird balancing precariously atop her fence.

When Kennedy frantically called animal control to tell them a wild turkey had managed to wander downtown, she was shocked by their response. It was something like “Yeah, so what,” she said, imitating a Boston accent.

The experience was a rite of passage for Greater Boston living.

Today, turkeys are a normal nuisance in Kennedy’s life. On a particularly bad morning recently, Kennedy said an aggressive turkey stole her breakfast sandwich as she was tying her shoe with one hand and fending it off with the other.

“They're like, gangs. They'll just, like, literally, come walking” toward you, she said, exasperated. “And you can't hit them.”

Turkeys are game birds in Massachusetts and can be hunted during periods in the spring and fall ? an activity that isn't feasible in crowded areas. Harming turkeys outside of those hunting seasons comes with steep fines and possible prison time.

The turkeys themselves can be hazardous. Last year, a Cambridge postal worker had to have his hip replaced after he was attacked by one of the birds. In July, a turkey violently pecked at a Boston woman's car, leaving giant scratches all over.

Nancy Farrell, 71, said she has watched a group of the 20-to-30-pound, toddler-sized turkeys stalk a man whose outfit resembled a mail carrier's uniform for multiple city blocks.

Not all residents are annoyed by their plucky neighbors’ antics, though. Some have found joy in the birds’ absurdity.

Caroline Burns, 56, said she was in awe the first time she saw a wild turkey in her Brookline neighborhood roughly 15 years ago. It was the dead of winter and a thick layer of snow coated everything around her home, but high in the treetop, she saw turkey peeking through the bare branches.

“I was impressed,” Burns said of the bird’s resilience.

As turkeys began to cause traffic jams and garner the ire of community members, Burns, an illustrator, decided to design an art project in 2018 to poke fun at the idea of the “annoying turkey.”

Instead of worrying about turkey aggression, Burns said she wanted to help people see the more whimsical and humorous side of the urban fowl. She’s helped Brookline embrace its burgeoning turkey population.

The city earlier this year installed life-size fiberglass turkey sculptures at downtown locations, and it used one of Burns’ turkey designs on its 2024 “I voted” stickers.

Burns sees her turkey neighbors as a “success story.”

“It may be unexpected to see turkeys around town, but it's an example of wildlife coming back,” she said. “I’m always a fan of that.”

Coming to a city near you

While urban turkeys are now a common sight in Massachusetts’ busiest areas, the phenomenon has begun to spread from coast to coast, too.

Turkeys now populate every state in the U.S. except Alaska.

In New York City, a wild turkey called Astoria made headlines earlier this year for taking up residence in a Park Avenue tree and window shopping at Saks on Fifth Avenue. At least two other wild turkeys have called Manhattan their home in the last few decades, but the animals are more often found in the only slightly less busy burrows of the Bronx and Staten Island.

Other human and turkey encounters have been reported in cities such as Philadelphia, Washington, D.C.  and Oakland, Calif.

But no metro area appears to have quiet as many fowl running amok as Greater Boston.

Scarpitti wagered that other cities could soon begin to experience the same levels of turkey mayhem, as the species’ population expands in their states.

But Scarpitti also argued that Boston has a few unique factors that make it particularly ripe for a burgeoning turkey culture.

The area's plentiful green space and small parks create ideal environments for the birds to congregate, and Massachusetts’ relatively small size allows the birds to migrate between rural and urban areas more quickly.

The people in Massachusetts, he argued, may also be playing a role by accidentally feeding the turkeys with bird feeders  or intentionally scattering seed. Scarpitti warned that feeding the birds will only lead to higher populations in urban centers, and could create more dangerous situations for the turkeys and the people who live around them.

“If there isn't enough food in the area, that's what kind of self-regulates their populations… and keeps it in balance with what humans will tolerate,” Scarpitti said, adding that Massachusetts has “exceeded that level” in a lot of places.

In other words, if you're feeling guilty about scarfing down gravy-covered turkey this Thanksgiving, remember: There are plenty more out there.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Wild turkeys are running amok in U.S. cities. Here's why.