Return of the Native | Wild Turkeys in New Hampshire

Wild turkeys patrol their home territory in a backyard in southern New Hamp­shire.
Credit: Joel Laino The landscape at the time of the report, though, was changing. Biologists had recently begun trapping wild birds and relocating them to a handful of former territories along the East Coast and throughout the Midwest, and were seeing success. In 1969, New Hampshire took a shot. It swapped 31 fishers for a flock of turkeys from West Virginia and re­located them to Pawtuckaway State Park in the southeastern part of the state. But the transplanted birds suffered high predation and back-to-back extreme winters—winters that also knocked the whitetail-deer population to an all-time low—and the flock disappeared. In January 1975, a young Fish & Game biologist named Ted Walski tried again, this time with funding from the federal Wildlife Restoration Program. Suspecting that the West Virginia strain of turkeys lacked the hardiness to survive New Hampshire’s climate, Walski looked to the Alle­gheny Mountains of western New York, the last holdout of native wild turkeys in the Northeast. Worried that Pawtuckaway’s mostly wooded habitat had contributed to the earlier failure, Walski picked the Connecticut River Valley town of Walpole for his original release site. The town had plenty of mixed forestland and reliable food sources beyond the turkeys’ preferred diet of seeds and nuts, including concentrations of crabapple trees, rose hips, and sharp-thorned barberry bushes. And, crucially, the town counted 13 active dairy farms. The corn kernels left behind on the farms’ manure-covered fields, Walski thought, would provide an important crop that could help the flocks get through a hard winter, when their primary food supplies would be buried under snow. With a colleague from Fish & Game, he released 25 Alle­gheny Mountains turkeys near Blake’s Farm, at the Sawyer Farm, and at the Graves family farm in Walpole—and began monitoring them.