(gobbling) REPORTER: New tonight, David's favorite, the turkey takeover!

Even at Thanksgiving, when you think they'd be scarce, it seems like wild turkeys are everywhere.

(car horn beeps) WOMAN: Get out of the way, turkey!

What the... Oh, my God, that turkey's crazy.

SCOTT WEIDENSAUL: Turkey populations have exploded.

That is actually probably a scientific description.

WOMAN: Careful of the traffic!

(turkey gobbles) No, don't cross the street!

WAYNE PETERSEN: I don't think anybody had any idea the extent to which they would habituate themselves to the suburbs, and even urban areas.

JIM CARDOZA: What we didn't expect was that they would be essentially everywhere.

♪ ♪ WOMAN: Turkeys are majestic.

WOMAN: Turkeys are impressive.

MAN: Good boy!

WOMAN: Ridiculous.

MAN: Stupid.

(turkeys chirping) CARTER J. CARTER: Turkeys are extraordinary.

And delicious-- they're extraordinarily delicious.

(people exclaiming) WOMAN: They're ornery, they're ugly, they're fantastic.

(laughs) MAN: Get out of here!

(yelps) WOMAN: They're Massholes, with feathers.

MAN: I don't want anything to happen to the birds, no matter how much they frighten me.

Because... (turkey chirping) They were here first.

♪ ♪ CAROLINE BARNES: I went to college with the plans of becoming a scientific illustrator, or biological illustrator.

It's animals that will always interest me.

You know, I'm not interested in drawing people.

That was the last thing I wanted to draw.

And the funnier, the better, I guess.

I'm, I'm a bit of a goofy, dopey person, really.

Turkeys, turkeys are pretty dopey, as well, so maybe I bond with them at that level.

I regard their physical reality as a source of amusement and wonder.

They can reach close to four feet in height.

The names are very unusual, very bizarre.

They have bumps on their necks which are called major and minor caruncles.

A fleshy protuberance hangs from their beak.

It's called a snood.

And then there's the skin that hangs from their neck.

That's called a wattle or a dewlap.

And if that's not enough, males have a collection of horsetail-like feathers dangling from their necks called a beard.

The males also grow talons on the backs of their legs which are called spurs, and they can grow to be an inch and a half long.

I find them beautiful, because they're so geometrically shaped.

And so iridescent, they're somewhat reptilian in their coloring.

And their behavior is just insane.

They're just so, uh, confident in their dopiness.

They'll say, "I'm just gonna peck at this glass, "or peck at this window, "and not have any good come of it, but I'm gonna do it anyway."

♪ ♪ I'm happy to say that a couple times, at least, I've convinced people to like them.

To see that they are kind of funny, or that they are a bit beautiful.

When I started seeing them, people would stop, they would be surprised, they would take pictures, they would laugh, they would run away, they would scream in horror.

But what makes me so happy now is that often, I will see people walking past a turkey, and they will look and just continue walking.

It shows that the turkeys are living their lives, we're living our lives, we're getting along, um, as it should be.

♪ ♪ (car horn beeps) ♪ ♪ ALEX VAILLANCOURT: We got in the ambulance, and it started to go, and then it stopped.

They said, "There's a turkey in the road."

And the ambulance drivers, they, you know, they honked their horns, they had the siren, and the turkey didn't care.

♪ ♪ I lay there, in pain, while the ambulance drivers waited for the turkey to cross the road.

FILM NARRATOR: Food must be taken from shore and from field, from lake and from stream.

And there's game to be had in the forests, too.

John Fox has learned well the paths of the nearby forests, which harbor many turkeys.

(fires) During Colonial times, wild turkeys were widespread throughout Massachusetts.

♪ ♪ But by the early 1900s, they had greatly diminished.

♪ ♪ PETERSEN: 1851 was actually the established date the last turkey was shot in Massachusetts.

♪ ♪ So there was a long period of time when there were no turkeys at all, they were extirpated from Massachusetts.

♪ ♪ WEIDENSAUL: Increasingly, conservationists and wildlife managers have been looking at this, you know, through the lens of repairing unnecessary damage that we've done in the past.

Every time you bring back a lost species, you're knitting together broken ecological connections.

There's kind of a sense of environmental justice, and almost a sense of morality.

If we as a species had been responsible for the extirpation of another animal from where it used to live, we really have kind of a responsibility to bring it back.

We made a huge effort, at great expense, to get bald eagles and peregrine falcons and California condors back on the landscape.

Those were native species that, at our hands... (clicks tongue): Tanked.

I think you can make the same case for the wild turkey.

CARDOZA: Beginning in the early 1900s, the predecessor to MassWildlife attempted, on three or four occasions, to restore turkeys to the commonwealth using pen-raised turkeys.

Those all failed.

Turns out that much of what a turkey has to know it learns from the adult hen.

They're learned behaviors rather than inherent.

♪ ♪ In the early 1970s, we worked with New York State to trap wild birds from Western New York and bring them to Massachusetts.

♪ ♪ In order to capture the turkeys, they use something called a cannon net.

And you have a large net that is folded up accordion-style, and there are three rockets made out of high-pressure gas pipe attached to it, with an explosive charge inside.

And in front of the net, there's bait.

So they come to the bait, and when you see them all clustered appropriately on the bait, you set off the explosive charges, and that propels the net over the turkeys.

♪ ♪ And I drove out there, picked them up, and brought them back, driving all night to release them the next morning.

We released 37 New York birds in Beartown State Forest in the Southern Berkshires.

♪ ♪ Most of the time, they'd, they'd fly a short distance.

They'd go into the woods.

WEIDENSAUL: And boy howdy, did that work.

Once they started these trap and transfer programs, wild turkey populations started expanding rapidly.

Turkeys are a fecund species.

I mean, they lay lots of eggs, they're really good parents, they're pretty good at bringing all those chicks to maturity.

So it does not take long for a relatively small population of wild turkeys to become a relatively big population of wild turkeys.

CARDOZA: By roughly the mid-1970s, we knew that we had a population in the Southern Berkshires.

What we didn't know for a long time was how far east we could go.

We began live-trapping birds from the Southern Berkshire population and releasing them in other areas of the state, eventually all the way to the Northeast and the Southeast.

♪ ♪ The birds that you see in these urban and suburban areas in Eastern Massachusetts are the lineal descendants of those that we brought in from the Berkshires.

PETERSEN: The success of this effort was so significant that the turkeys were... Clearly they weren't just staying in the wildlife management areas, they were spreading, and the rest is history.

(laughs) (turkey chirping) PEG PREBLE: I went to pay the parking meter, and there was a turkey in front of the parking meter.

And the turkey would not let me get near the meter.

I tried sneaking around behind it, I tried going around the car from the other side.

I wasn't really ready to get my feet pecked off, or whatever a turkey might do to me.

So I gave up.

Oh, turkey won, I got a ticket.

MAN: This is the most I've ever seen at one time.

MAN: This is the most turkeys I've ever seen anywhere!

PETERSEN: Why do turkeys sort of move into the suburbs and urban areas?

I think that the answer is, they, they can.

WEIDENSAUL: We have inadvertently created the perfect landscape for wild turkeys, the perfect mix of habitat and food resources, and we've given them protection in many areas.

But, you know, I think to a wild turkey, God must be a wild turkey, because the world has been created as an oyster for wild turkeys.

(footsteps approaching) CARDOZA: What do turkeys need in order to survive?

The basics are food and shelter.

(turkeys chirping) And what do you have in some of these urban areas?

You've got parks, you've got roadways, you've got yards.

And they maintain these large trees that may bear nuts, such as acorns from oaks, hickory nuts from hickories, which are food for the turkeys.

People also have gardens, bird feeders, shrubs, which may have berries.

WEIDENSAUL: Turkeys will eat almost anything.

They're highly omnivorous.

Turkeys will eat small vertebrates, they'll eat, you know, they'll eat salamanders and small lizards if they can find them, frogs.

The majority of their diet, though, is plant-based.

They eat a lot of seeds, a lot of nuts, a lot of acorns.

Because turkeys are so adaptable in what they eat, and so adaptable in the kinds of habitats they can live in, and we're finding that turkeys can adapt to urban environments much more than we ever expected.

One of the behaviors of turkeys that, that unfortunately have brought them, you know, to the media's attention, and in some cases the police attention and so on, is that fact that historically, they were not suburban birds.

You know, they've adapted very well, needless to say, to all sorts of things, even cities, in some cases.

So under those circumstances, they're encountering people, which are not something that they normally encounter.

CARDOZA: They have a pecking order, a dominance hierarchy.

And every turkey in that group knows who is subordinate to who, who is dominant over each other.

MAN: Look at him eating his head.

He's got his mouth around his head!

WEIDENSAUL: When the toms are acting aggressive in the springtime, when the hormones are flowing and they've got a lot of testosterone going on... Yeah, I can understand why people get a little bit freaked out about it.

(gobbling softly) CARDOZA: And if the humans are fearful, and run away, that just shows them who's dominant.

They will harass the people to find out where they fit and how they should interact with them.

PETERSEN: They've lost their, their sort of innate fear of people, and they perceive them potentially as competitors.

You have to lead the turkey to believe you're in charge.

But if you exhibit, you know, if you start backing up or running, that can really freak them out and they'll become more aggressive.

WOMAN: Holy (bleep)!

MAN: Go away.

WEIDENSAUL: They lack a sense of proportion sometimes.

(man grunts) WOMAN: Go away!

MAN: Go away!

WEIDENSAUL: Remember, we're bigger than they are.

They don't always remember that, though.

(man laughing) MAN: Oh, my God!

Get outta here.

PETERSEN: Generally speaking, though, I think it would be a significant miscarriage of justice to say that all turkeys are, you know, bad news.

It's like, um... (turkeys gobbling) You know, if you see a bunch of kids standing around on the street corner, they're looking for trouble?

No, not necessarily.

They may be just looking to cross the street.

So, turkeys are the same way.

(turkey chirping, pecking car) When they see a reflection of themselves, whether it be in glass, or it could even be something as reflective as an automobile bumper or a hubcap on a car, whatever, they will then, as part of this whole sort of dominance thing, they will become very aggressive.

(van reverse signal beeping) They see themselves, and they perceive it to be another turkey, and they go after it.

(pecking glass) MAN: That's gotta hurt!

Doesn't that hurt?

PETERSEN: You say, well, if they're hammering on glass and hubcaps and things, how smart can they be?

That's a behavior that is, from a turkey's point of view, it is establishing, trying to maintain its dominance, which is what they do.

The fact that they continue to do it, you might say, "Well, how swift is that?"

WEIDENSAUL: Wild turkeys are really smart birds, and certainly among the savviest of wild birds.

(turkey chirping) I've seen wild turkeys stop and look both ways before they cross a busy suburban street.

(turkey chirping) PETERSEN: There's a lot going on in those, behind those beady little eyes and that naked little head.

(laughs) (turkey chirping) WEIDENSAUL: Turkeys can fly extremely well.

They're built for short bursts of speed.

They have fairly rounded wings.

You know, they're not designed for long-distance travel in the air.

PETERSEN: They roost in trees at night.

When you have occasion to actually see a turkey in full, full flight, it's very impressive.

WOMAN: Please tell me you got the running start.

(people laughing) ♪ ♪ MYLES GORDON: I was at a busy intersection at a red light, and a turkey was pacing right in front of the car.

Everybody's honking their horn at me.

I didn't know what to do.

So my son is sitting next to me and he's eating a sandwich, and I said, "Just break me off a little piece of the sandwich," and I toss it to the sidewalk, and the turkey goes running to the sidewalk and starts gobbling it up.

And then I realized...

It was a turkey sandwich.

(birds chirping) CARTER: I worked at the Brookline Community Mental Health Center, and I lived a couple of miles from there.

And on my walk to work, I had no choice but to pass through what I called the turkey attack zone, where there's this intersection where kind of two hills come down together, and, like, all the turkeys from the whole area funnel down into this one street.

(car horn honking) (turkeys gobble) They would kind of be there, like, menacing me.

(turkeys gobbling) (in footage): Hey!

(voiceover): There was something like, roughly a dozen total, like, attacks, which I would define as, like, they made contact with my body in one way or the other.

I have sort of flashes of memory, like, spurs on shins, wings-- they get really high up, like, like...

I was quite shocked by, like, how much loft they could get when they kind of come for you.

I started to get kind of intellectually interested in the turkeys.

The more I learned, the clearer it became that, like, what was happening to me was a side effect of one of the great conservation success stories of the 20th century.

And that was something that ultimately I did want to be a part of.

Not primarily because I was seeking revenge.

♪ ♪ The other piece of this is that I've always been really passionate about food.

For me, a lot of it, it was ingredient-driven.

If you don't hunt and fish and forage and garden, there's a lot of things that you can never buy.

If your priority is really having access to, like, the most beautiful food, then hunting is an incredibly environmentally friendly way to access that stuff.

♪ ♪ There is a taste of place that you get from eating wild game that is entirely its own thing, and it's really good.

It's really good.

Wild turkeys are canny, wary.

They're very perceptive, they have pretty excellent visual acuity, they have really good hearing.

♪ ♪ (squeaking, imitating high-pitched calls) The, the feeling that you get when you're calling and a tom turkey gobbles back at you is electrifying.

It's... You made nature think that you were nature.

And that's... That's wild.

(birds chirping) Killing anything makes me sad.

It's a hard feeling to explain, and it's something that I think leads to a lot of misunderstandings.

I think what you often see, if you're an outsider to the world of hunting, is people doing what we call grip and grins, which is, like, you elated with something that you killed.

And it looks barbaric, it looks inhumane, and it seems to, like, completely negate the idea that you're a person who cares about these animals and who cares about the environment.

But things have to die for me to be alive.

And being able to kill a turkey and take that animal out of the wild I tend to regard as maybe the most ethical way to consume almost anything, particularly meat.

(gun fires) Every wild animal dies an awful death.

Every single one.

We don't see it, so it's easy for those of us who aren't super-immersed in nature to disavow that fact.

Hunting actually is a far more merciful and relatively painless death than any wild animal could normally hope to experience.

I am willing to take ethical responsibility for their death as part of trying to, like, steward a system that is actually sustainable and survivable for us, because as it stands now, the way people eat meat is going to kill us all.

♪ ♪ DANA BERUBE: So I saw this giant turkey, and I approached it-- I wanted to take a picture of him, and just look at him, and admire his chonkiness.

It chased me.

I tried to make myself bigger, like, doing one of these to scare it off.

It didn't work.

That (bleep) bit me.

That turkey feared no God and no man.

LAUREN MANN CHANEY: Come on, what are you doing?

What are you doing?

Where are ya?

Oh, you're gonna-- come on in!

Come on.

(voiceover): This turkey came to me when she was just one day old.

(in footage): Wads, you want this?

Here-- there you go, oh, look at that.

Oh, there you go, there's some treats for ya!

(voiceover): And I looked at the feet and I says, "Oh, that is so sad," that they're all curled, and all twisted, and we named it Waddles, because, as you can see, it waddles when it walks.

And I could see that she is not a turkey that is ever gonna really be able to survive in the wild.

(in footage): You think there's a music lesson coming?

(voiceover): I teach music lessons.

She'll waddle in the house, come into the music area, and I'll say, "Okay, Waddles, up on the hassock," and she'll sit up there and she'll listen to the music lesson.

♪ ♪ Waddles loves music.

(violin plays) How about you're gonna play a... A G scale for me.

Can you do that?

GIRL: Okay.

CHANEY: That's a good one.

(violin playing scale) (violin slows and stutters) (scale continues) A, A, A, A-- oh, you forgot A.

A, A-- ♪ A ♪ Where's the A string?

A string?

I've saved Waddles because it is my gift.

It's part of, um, educating my grandchildren, my children, my students.

Educating just regular people as to how wild animals are meant to be part of our life.

Waddles is part of the music class.

And that's the way it is.

WEIDENSAUL: We as a society are starting to grapple with the fact that, if we want to live in a healthy environment, we have to learn to deal with big, occasionally inconvenient animals, like wild turkeys.

(trolley bell ringing) Turkeys are a really good example of the paradoxes we create for ourselves.

This is just an inherent tension between humans and our relationship with the natural world, you know?

We often love the notion of wilderness and wildlife more than we like the reality of wilderness and wildlife.

PETERSEN: There's a tension zone between deer and coyotes, raccoons and skunks-- all kinds of animals.

Many people like to see those animals, but what they don't realize is that once those animals become habituated, they then end up creating problems.

We've restored this magnificent game animal, we've restored this magnificent aspect of our natural heritage.

The difficulty is that we're restoring an animal to a landscape that is not the same as the one that it disappeared from.

And so sometimes bringing back a lost species has unintended consequences.

That certainly has been the case with turkeys.

PETERSEN: Whether they be, you know, bears tearing down bird feeders, or white-tailed deer carrying deer ticks that pass on Lyme disease, those are unforeseen consequences.

Wildlife populations really, by their nature, are not intended to be controlled.

You know, they're gonna do what they're gonna do, and unfortunately, so many of the wildlife problems that we've created... Well, that's the bottom line, we've created them.

(car horn beeping) CARDOZA: Everything has consequences.

And those consequences aren't always what is initially intended.

Yes, there are some turkeys in suburban areas that are aggressive and chase or attack people.

Or they run out in the road and there's a car accident.

(car horn honks) Or they dig in your garden.

But wildlife is part of the real world.

And that involves the positive characteristics, as well as the negative.

(turkey gobbling) If people are going to live and coexist with wildlife, people should recognize animals for what they are.

They are wild animals.

Even though they are accustomed to human presence, that is very different than saying they're tame.

They're not.

WEIDENSAUL: Most of the onus for peaceful cohabitation in urban areas between turkeys and humans really, really lands on the humans.

We can't expect the turkeys to change their behavior.

You know, we're the ones who can recognize that there's a problem, and we can, you know, do what we can to try to alleviate that.

CARDOZA: We were fortunate that we were able to reintroduce wild turkeys to the state.

It was a thriving success.

But we tend to rely too much on our successes and think, "Okay, everything's fine now.

We've restored them, we're gonna have turkeys forever."

Nature is not constant.

Nature itself is always changing.

So we have to be vigilant.

We have to be able to address those changes, particularly in the context of climate change.

We have to be attentive to the habitats, so that we can protect not just the individual animals, but the suite of organisms that involve those different biotic communities.

Yes, people in urban areas and suburban areas can live with turkeys, and with coyotes, and with bears, and with skunks and foxes, and all those species.

Just live in comfort with them in their presence where they are.

You're all part of the same Earth.

♪ ♪ I still love the turkeys because they're gonna stand their ground.

And I think I admire that about them.

If they can coexist with us and they can find a way to live in the city, I'm impressed.

There are a lot of people who don't pull off living in the city very well.

I would rather have insane birds running around than live somewhere concrete and sterile.

It is our ethical obligation to, uh, to do better than those who came before us.

Undo as much as possible damage that we have done, often out of a sense of our own human supremacy over against the wider web of life.

Something has to give, something, you know... We have to learn to share this planet, somehow.

(laughs) ♪ ♪