The Wild Turkey and Its Hunting. Edward Avery McIlhenny

commercial value everywhere.

      The extensive literature on wild and domesticated turkeys is by no means confined to the English language, for we meet with many references to these fowls, together with accounts and descriptions of them, distributed through prints and publications of various kinds, not only in Latin, but in the Scandinavian languages as well as in French, German, Spanish, Italian, and doubtless in others of the Old World. Some of these accounts appeared as long ago as the early part of the sixteenth century, or perhaps even earlier; for it is known that Grijalva discovered Mexico in 1518, and Gomarra and Hernandez, whose writings appeared soon afterward, gave, among their descriptions of the products of that country, not only the wild turkey, but, in the case of the latter writer, referred to the wild as well as to the domesticated form, making the distinction between the two.

      In order, however, to render our history of the wild turkeys in America as complete as possible, we must dip into the past many centuries prior to the discovery of the New World by those early navigators. We must go back to the time when it was questionable whether man existed upon this continent at all. In other words, we must examine and describe the material representing our extinct turkeys handed us by the paleontologists, or the fossilized remains of the prehistoric ancestors of the family, of which we have at hand a few fragments of the greatest value. These I shall refer to but briefly for several reasons. In the first place, their technical descriptions have already appeared in several widely known publications, and in the second, what I have here to say about them is in a popular work, and technical descriptions are not altogether in place. Finally, such material as we possess is very meagre in amount indeed, and such parts of it as would in any way interest the general reader can be referred to very briefly.

      The fossil remains of a supposed extinct turkey, described by Marsh[1] as Meleagris altus from the Post-pliocene of New Jersey, is, from the literature and notices on the subject, now found to be but a synonym of the Meleagris superba of Cope from the Pleistocene of New Jersey. At the present writing I have before me the type specimen of Meleagris altus of Marsh, for which favor I am indebted to Dr. Charles Schuchert of the Peabody Museum of Yale University. My account of it will be published in another connection later on.

      Some years after Professor Marsh had described this material as representing a species to which I have just said he gave the specific name of altus, it would appear that I did not fully concur in the propriety of doing so, as will be seen from a paper I published on the subject about fifteen years ago[2]. This will obviate the necessity of saying anything further in regard to M. superba.

      So far as my knowledge carries me, this leaves but two other fossil wild turkeys of this country, both of which have been described by Professor Marsh and generally recognized. These are Meleagris antiqua in 1871, and Meleagris celer in 1872. My comments on both of these species will be found in the American Naturalist for July, 1897, on pages 648, 649.[3]