Turkeys known for being birds, famous for being meats and two types. Nobody thinks much about them. So let's have some fun. Let's find out why turkeys are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks, welcome to a whole new podcast episode of podcast all about why being Alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmetta, and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co host, Katie Golden. Katie, what is your relationship to or opinion of turkeys? Gobble?
We'll go.
Bobblegle, gobble gobble.
I this is Katie not I know my turkey impression. It was really good, right, like I do, a very good turkey impression.
Give it a go up. But go Google goog gobble gobble. Yeah.
I like turkeys, so I think they are really interesting animals because they've been so they're so affiliated or associated with Thanksgiving. Of course, we do eat them. Let's just get that out of the way, right, We eat them, folks, that that happens. We do eat the We do eat the turkeys. Wild turkeys are really interesting. They're I think they're very beautiful, like the kinds of turkeys we eat do not. I mean, I'm sure we're probably gonna talk
about all this. They don't really resemble as much the wild turkeys that you see right roaming the American wilderness and suburbs. But you know, yeah, I think it's it is just really cool because I like I like birds, and especially like birds that remind me that birds are the last living family of dinosaurs, which is fun.
Yes, I agree with all that. And also I should disclose how much I like eating turkey. I think I eat more turkey than most Americans. We would do Schmid family thanksgivings, and only me and my dad were excited about turkey as a food. It's my main sandwich meat, all of the types Deli meat, dark meat, white me with gravy. It's all great.
Let me let me ask your sandwich preferences, Alex, So, like, what kind of turkey do you get? Like? Do you have like a turkey sandwich pretty much weekly?
Yes, I'm a big deli counter person. I get like a turkey and a cheese, often a provolone.
That's the right answer. This was a test and you passed it, so yeah, I can't.
I really like the show could continue. That's good.
Yeah, I really can't deal with packaged turkey like this, Like when I look in there and I see it kind of moist and jiggly and little flimy, and then I open that up and then I get that sort of like of like turkey smell right from the package. I cannot deal with that. That is too much for me. So it's got to be fresh sliced from a local deli or not at all.
Yeah, I feel the same, Like I am actually fine with the package, but it's just not nearly as good to me, you know. Yeah, why settle. I'm a poultry fiend. I love it, and so I have many opinions on this, and many thanks to coop Bear. Also you agent for suggesting this supporting this on the discord. I think it's a pretty US Thanksgiving driven suggestion. Also shout out to our Canadian friends who celebrated Thanksgiving last month. But either way, we're going to talk about the bird and the food
all at once. This is a great show.
Yeah, I mean I think that it is. You know, it might sound contradictory, right to appreciate the animal but also not like want to maybe sometimes eat that animal. I personally think that it is important to know where our food comes from, to respect them, and to also encourage sort of better practices in terms of what we eat and how we treat our farmed animals. We can appreciate the food, but also want to appreciate respect the animal.
I feel same and also with bison. Everybody knows I love byson and I eat bison when it's offered to me. Yeah, for all those things, the bird, the food, everything. We're leading with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics this week. That's in a segment called oh come y fens of sift podstats Let not bad facts, dismay do you say stats straight to your face to start the
pod to day, So perk your ears and listen. Clear these digits that we say, Oh, tidings of stats we enjoy, Steps we enjoy, hot hidings of starts we enjoyed.
I'm clapping because you really got the pentameter right on that one. I don't know, I don't know what I'm saying. You did a good job. Also, is this sort of airing on Thanksgiving? I think you just mentioned when it was airing.
But it'll be it's the week before the week of us thanksgoing. Okay, yeah, okay, well, which is kind of Christmas mode.
I don't know, I don't know what is it?
Like, do you start listen?
Do you start jamming out to Christmas songs before Thanksgiving?
I do not, But I appreciate Christmas stuff, okay, which is maybe a weird position, right, Like if I see Christmas decorations, I'm like, that's cool, but I don't really put on Christmas music till December.
It's like I can both appreciate Santa and also eat him as a food. So I get.
It, save me the beard. I don't know how you would eat it right. That name was submitted by Lemons and Leaves on the Discord. Thank you for that. We have a new name every week. Please make a Missilli and Waggion bad as possible. Submit through Discord or to sip potot gmail dot com. And the first number this week is around eight hundred beests. And this is the
one number that came up on our Renfare show. That's when Native people in North America began domesticating turkeys around eight hundred BC.
Yeah, and I think I remember reading the findings about this where we had found evidence of a type of enclosure for uh for turkeys.
Yeah, they it was a wild bird and then they started domesticating at keeping it at their communities.
Yeah, I mean that's similar to the story with chickens. I mean, chickens come from a bird known as the jungle fowl, and they are now sort of our big, juicy chickens. But yeah, the original sort of jungle fowl were leaner. They're like, I mean, they still exist, but they're leaner. They're not really they're they're you know, more of a game, gamey sort of bird. But then we
domesticated them and then yeah, made them, made them all plump. Yeah, the turkey and jungle flower a sort of some learned that, Like they're very colorful in the wild, and they have all sorts of like browns and you know, yellows and golds, and jungle fowl even have like some greens as well. But then, like when we domesticated both of them, I mean, probably not this early on, Like I would imagine that in that the early domestication there, we didn't have turkeys
with white feathers running around. But now turkeys do have white feathers, as do chickens, which makes it I think the purpose of that is to make it easier to like, when we're cleaning the bird carcass, like then the there's the feathers, like the white feathers are just less conspicuous.
Yeah, that's all right on, Yeah, apparently that's part of it. With turkeys. There's also just some flattening out of the different kinds of turkeys and how we've domesticated it.
Yeah.
Yeah, North North America is where turkeys come from. It's the home of five subspecies of turkey scientific name Meliagris galipavo. And that connection to foul actually it leads us into our first takeaway number one. The bird name Turkey comes from the name of the country and fifteen hundred's world trade confusion.
Ah okay, that's really okay, all right.
They are in English modern day they are named after the country of Turkey in West Asia.
That is very interesting because yeah, of course turkeys are not from Turkey, they are from North America. They are an indigenous species of bird here. So yeah, tell me what happened there, Alex, because it sounds like someone messed up big time.
What's that Simpsons thing? Like, I hope someone got fired for that. Blunder. I hope some won't get fired for that blunder. Yeah, perfect, Yeah, Yeah. And there's a couple of key sources here, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, also the National Geographic Field Guide to Birds of North America, and a book called one Hundred Birds and How They Got Their Names that's by nonfiction writer Diana Wells. Because, yeah, the word Turkey entered English as a name for a country.
It's a longtime name for the part of Asia Minor that was part of the Ottoman Empire. Also, when that area became a new country in nineteen twenty three, it named itself Turkie, which is not how we tend to say it in English, Turkia. It's spelled t u with an umlaut rkiye Turkie.
That's actually more similar to the Italian version of Turkia.
Yeah, this bird name and what we often call the country is very anglicized.
Yeah.
And also another number here is twenty twenty two, because that's when the Turkish government made a formal request to the United Nations that they and other countries call the country Turkie rather than Turkey, like they're trying to shift to their actual name for themselves.
Yeah, that's I get that. But it's like, once we start calling something our own little American name for it, that's that's pretty sticky.
We're stubborn.
Yeah, you know, it's now I'm thinking more about words like with the It is interesting because in Italian, like the term for like turkey the meat or the bird is like takino. It's not turk.
Cool. I don't know why that actually tracks with this. Yeah, because the name turkey is relatively English specific. In France, this bird is called dian doon, which yeah, like yeah, doorbell bird. But the first French name was cooktiins, meaning cock from India, bird from India. And what generally happened here is Europe in the fifteen hundreds, with the Colombian exchange and with better sailing ships in world trade, they start importing tasty birds and interesting birds from all over
the world. Yeah, they're like, let's get the fowl. Let's do it.
Yeah, it's I mean, you know, you see a bird and you're like, look at that graceful, elegant creature of the ground and the sky. I do want to eat it, and so okay, that's so then, yeah, we were at the point where we're importing a bunch of tasty birds, and I'm assuming that a crate of turkeys from America and a crate of some poor Turkish bird got like their labels got switched.
Or something exactly. They all got lumped together. Because, yeah, you've got lots of species of fowl from East Africa, in particular New Mida day as a taxonomic group of
African guinea fowl. There's other fowl from India, from the South Pacific, and with a lot of that trade, the key funneling point was Ottoman Turkey because it's this place in this big Ottoman Empire that has existing trade relationships in a bunch of ways with Europe, and so so many of the fowl get funneled through there that people in say France, just start calling all of it Indian fowl. People in England start calling all of it turkey fowl or just turkeys.
We kind of consider the modern trade of like things just coming from all over the world, and the origins of food and other imports being sometimes confusing, like not knowing where they come from right as like a new thing. But I guess that's it's not all that new.
Yeah, Yeah, we're like into it, but also messy with it. And they did that with not just these birds coming through the country of Turkey, but also birds from the Americas, because, like we said on the Renfare Show, it's plausible for Elizabethan England to have turkey legs because as soon as fifteen eleven, the Spanish Royal Court started requesting turkeys from their new conquered colony and mecha Ago and they had
already heard of Turkey's when they requested them. Like these were brought over very quickly by food fan Europeans.
And how soon did Rye follow? Like did when was turkey on? Rye introduced?
Well, look up a deliologist for this information. Yeah, so the name of a turkey, Yes, it's probably one of the two biggest cases of English speakers doing that. The other one is the word corn. That was an old English word for any grain in a generic sense, and then we applied it to maze that they called Indian corn and then just called corn. Right, So turkeys are like that too. It's just a choice by English speakers at the fifteen hundreds.
I see, I see, it's you know, another thing, corn and turkeys. I always see corn as a you know, this is strange to me. Corn is very associated with like Thanksgiving and fall, but I only ever eat corn in the summer. What's going on, Alex?
Yeah, it is a good summer food. I'm also kind of a corn fiend. I eat it all the time.
So you do, you're just like out in like you're the going around to farms eating all the corn, grabbing chickens. People think it's chupacabra, but no, it's Alex cheepishmitty.
Yeah. Uh and yeah, so that's why this North American bird is named after Torqui sort of, Yeah, because we're dumb. Yeah, we're done, Yeah, and back some more numbers. The next number is eleven thousand, five hundred feathers. This is eleven five hundred feathers is the feather contents of one Native American blanket that was found by anthropologists in twenty twenty.
So, okay, explain to me how is because like, when I think of a blanket, I don't necessarily think of feathers unless it's like, is this like a blanket that's been fit with feathers sort of like a like a duvet, or is it woven out of feathers?
It's neither. It's that the feathers are sort of tied together by woven plant fibers. Ooh, what's now the southwestern US. They used yucca plant fibers to weave together over eleven thousand feathers into one blanket. And we think they harvested that from at least nine adult male turkeys just for the one blanket.
Do we know, like what the purpose of this blanket was. Was it like a cozy blanket for cuddling under, or was this more of an artistic piece for say, something more formal.
It's sort of everything. Apparently Pueblo people's in what's now the southwestern US, they pretty much made a blanket for each member of the community. According to Shannon Tushingham of Washington State University, quote, it is likely that every member of an ancestral Pueblo community, from infants to it else, possessed one of these blankets. End quote. That's so cool. You're a human being, you get one of these, you care about you? You know. It was very fundamental.
I want to live in a society where from the day you're born you are guaranteed an awesome blanket.
Yeah, it was like very big and crucial for them and hope people's donny people. They also made turkey feather blankets and there's also people still weaving those today. According to New Mexico Wildlife magazine, archaeologist Mary Weaki produced new samples in twenty eighteen for a museum, and she's of Comanche and Santa Clara descent. She said she was inspired by her ancestors and their creativity and their patients to
do this. So it's a long running art practice, sort of textile practice, and it brings up something really surprising about turkey domestication because it turns out that for many centuries of North American people mainly domesticated turkeys to like harvest the feathers and without necessarily killing the birds. Oh whow Really it was not a food thing initially.
And so they're also harvesting the feathers as the birds are molting them. They're not killing them for the feathers exactly. Yeah.
They either molt them naturally or they would remove a few feathers in a way that let the birds still be alive. So it's almost sort of like what I think of with fiber art stuff with lamas and sheets and things like raising them for what they generate on their outsides.
I'm looking at a picture of one of these turkey feather blankets and it is so like it is way fluffier than I was anticipating. It looks really really fluffy, and it looks very comfortable, like it would be super soft and super fluffy.
It's also really pretty.
It's like it looks very cozy and comfortable but also really beautiful.
And so that was a huge surprised me about the history of turkey domestication, and Smithsonian says that we think Pueblo people only began eating their turkeys around the eleven hundred's AD, so well more than a thousand years after they started domesticating them. It was probably just population growth and a lack of other game was why they started eating some of them.
I see. Interesting, So they didn't they maybe didn't need them as a food source before then, but then you got enough mouths to feed and there wasn't enough like other game animals, and then you start eating them.
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, And yeah, apparently there's also finds that Mayan sites in Central America where it seems like turkey meat was only used rarely in religious and cultural ceremonies until pretty late in Mayan history, and so like when Europeans were eating turkeys, they were imitating how Native people used them. But it was a very recent Native practice. It was only a few centuries before the Columbian Exchange.
I mean, I get that if you have other choices, turkey can be a little dry. I know you like it, Alex, but let's admit turkey can be a little dry. Can be a little dry.
Yeah, people tell me this, and they're right, and I love it anyway. It's my foolish palette because yeah, but also I love it.
I guess some people like dry sandwiches.
And also, you know, native people are not a monolith. They're probably some Native people who ate turkeys earlier than this, and then people hunt turkeys to this day, the wildlins. And one amazing modern number about that is the year twenty twenty three.
That was you know, I'm going to say one year ago.
That's true for a while. And in twenty twenty three, residents of Carmel, California bestowed the name Cupid on a local wild turkey. And they did that because some hunter put an arrow through this turkey. Oh Man, and it just continued walking around and hanging out. No, and was alive. Still.
I hate this. I don't like this. Yeah, I'm not anti hunting, but I'm very much pro finishing what you started.
Because wow, it's very incompetent hunting.
Yo. That looks not fun for this turkey. I mean, this turkey is carrying it well in a way that I would not personally, I think, be able to handle if I had a whole arrow running directly through my body right in and out.
So props to this turkey. Yeah, and like it's moving well enough that, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, locals were not able to catch Cupid to bring them in for treatment because it's because Cuba is just like living. Yeah, at least in twenty twenty three. And yeah, the Guardian says that it was a thirty and J row and that locals named a Cupid because of cute Valentine's Day stuff.
Yeah, adorable, it's really cute. And an animal has an arrow just jutting out of its body.
And the turkeys will probably be of excitement to game hunters for a while because, according to National Geographic they're the largest game bird in North America. They're significantly bigger than grouse, ptarmigan's other mostly ground birds. And so you know, if any game bird is going to survive an arrow, it's probably a turkey. Yeah, and it's amazing if they can do it. It's rare, but it happens once in a while.
We got to start, we got to start getting more like wild ostriches and EMUs. So not only can they survive an arrow, they can like actually shoot one back at you. Increase the challenge difficulty level.
Yeah, teach your ostrich archery. Yeah, folks, so many of you just have an ostrich and you haven't taught them many important sports or hunting combat.
They've got the long legs, the long necks. Don't tell me they can't like use their own necks as like a sort of bowstring like in cartoons.
I trust them. And the next amazing turkey number is one point six miles, which is more than two point five kilometers.
Watch walk one point six miles.
It's not all that far. Oh, I don't care that much, you know, Yeah, not that I do it yet, but that distance, that's how far away a female turkey can hear the gobble of a male turkey. One point six miles.
Garble, garble, garbel, garbage, gobble, Google Google, boggabo Google Google bug a goggle. Uh, that's great, that's that's that's actually pretty distant, I think to hear a.
Gobble, I really thought it's pretty soft.
Yeah, but they're no, they're loud.
Yeah. And the thing is it is so loud because males specifically make the gobble sound and it is for mating and courting females.
Oh yeah, that's so when any of us.
Do a gobble impression, we are hitting on lady turkeys, it is a it is.
A come hither call for them them, ladies.
Can you do?
Can you do a good turkey gobble, like a real one? That's pretty good. That's pretty good.
Oh that's pretty good too. Yeah. Yeah, this we will, we will.
We can do that, and we'll just have lady turkeys flying sort of ungracefully into our laps.
It's like beetle Baby, like a crowd of them flipping out.
Yeah.
Uh but yeah. And it turns out turkeys are highly communicative. Yes, and according to the US National Zoo, biologists have identified at least fifteen different turkey vocalizations. Fifteen vocalizations far more than gobbles. Yeah.
Yeah, there's a lot of murmurs and weird purring sounds that they make, and it's both the males and females that use them, although like that kind of like loud gobble is really the males doing it. But the Yeah, there is a lot of They're a very social bird and there's a lot of communication.
Yeah, I'm glad, you know, I had no idea before researching, because yeah, they can like you said, purring, murmuring, they can whistle. Apparently, young turkeys use a repeated whistle to signal that they're lost. It is complex communication for a turkey. You know. It's cool.
Yeah, absolutely, And the little baby turkeys are called pulse.
I love this topic. That's great, thank you, folks. And then turkeys, of course communicate partly to be social and during the winter they will form bands with social hierarchies that occasionally tussle with other bands. In spring, they make the chicks live with their mothers until autumn, so mostly in the hard winter season they will get together and then we'll kind of scatter after that.
Yeah, there are competitions for hierarchy, for ability to mate, and then there is these like sort of turkey standoffs kind of like a West Side story turkey situation or in your you're.
Always yeah, and there's too many examples, but a link a few of just news stories in the US, because annually there's some kind of story about a gang of wild turkeys is running the streets of Staten Island or Boston or Los Angeles or wherever. And it's just because they're social late in the year, and that'll happen.
I mean, like what it's also just funny to be like, oh, oh no, a gang of wild turkeys. It's like, what what do you mean. They're just they're not allowed to exist, they're just existing. Make it sound like they're doing some kind of like drive buys or something.
Yeah, And in like every story, there's always a picture of turkeys in the way and like a suburban road and the drive could just go over to the next block. It'd be very easy, it's not.
Yeah.
Yeah, so that's that's their situation. And the other exciting thing turkeys do in the wild is they will sleep in tree branches and in tree tops. Yeah. And so most of the time wild turkeys walk or run, and then at night they use their wings to fly up to a roost for sleep.
Yeah, they can fly very very short distances. I mean it's similar to chickens, right, like and other sort of galliform galliform birds where they really are mostly it's mostly walking, but they can glide and fly short distances, which yeah, helps with the with the roosting, which is it is funny to imagine just happening upon a tree of turkeys looking down at you kind of more I don't know, raptor Like, they're not raptors in the sense of bird wrappers like and eagles and stuff, but I mean like
Jurassic Park raptors.
Yeah, that's so cool. And again they can fly a little bit, which leads into our next big takeaway because takeaway number two, turkeys have both white meat and dark meat because wild turkeys fly a little bit.
Hmm.
If you've ever wondered why when you're eating a turkey there seem to be two totally separate categories of turkey meat, the answer is the biology involved in wild turkey flight.
Oh whow, so we've got two muscle groups. I'm assuming yes.
It turns out it's a difference between fast twitch and slow twitch muscle, right and in mammals, including humans, Those tend to be kind of mingled together or mixed up in a way where when you're eating a mammal, don't eat a human, it'll look like a relatively uniform color and we'll call it red meat or somethings. They're very separate. It's like totally different muscle districts in the body.
What kind of meat is on a Santa Christmas meat gingerbread flavored.
And beard? The two types gingerbread and beard. Yes, for the fast.
Twitch muscles, that is, like, what are we describing here? For slow twitch muscles are those that are like the mechanism that engages the muscles like it's is it like a slower mechanism? Whereas like for the fast twitch muscles, like the mechanism that engages the muscles like faster. Why are they given those names?
Fast twitches basically for sudden movements once in a while on command. Wild turkeys are able to fly because they need to nest in trees. And slow twitches more for like a powerful and endurance based movement.
So like walking our standard walking moving around versus like clapping or punching or by.
Yeah a good like other example here is ducks. We think of ducks as being just dark meat if we're eating them, is like a conceptual thing about ducks, and that's not really true. They have some fast switch muscle, but ducks when they're in trouble, they mainly just fly because they fly in almost all situations unless they're walking
a couple of steps to eat the next grass. You know. Yeah, that's so interesting, and so so their body seems to be almost all slow twitch muscle because when they fly out of an emergency, it's pretty much their usual flight speed. They can't like do different gears of that very much.
That is interesting because like with with bird muscles are curious because like for like birds that are migratory, they have to build up a bunch of muscles for their migration, and so they're not like these like migratory geese and stuff aren't doing like squats and you know, crunches in order to get buff or their migration. They just eat more and then convert more of that food into muscle
like without even trying, which is really not fair. Like you could like imagine just like imagine being like like seasonally, like it's you know, the holidays coming up, and you just like you know, eat a lot of food and that automatically gets turned into nice muscles for your transatlantic flight.
I want to visit Europe with my food muscle.
You know, like people were always like, you know, a gorilla mindset in terms of getting swollen stuff. I'm Goose mindset, man, I'm Goose in it.
I'm also imagining Gold's gym, but it's Goose's gym. That would be a good workout space.
Yeah, that'd be fun.
I feel like that'd be a laid back vibe there well. And a couple of key sources here are writing for National Geographic by Mark Strauss, and also an episode of SI Show on YouTube. That one was hosted by Michael Randa. They say that the chemistry of these different muscles is why they appear white and dark to us when we're eating. The fast switch muscles contain glycogen, which is a type of sugar that we can burn in emergencies, and the
glecogen's pretty colorless. But slow twitch muscles contain lots of myoglobin, which is red, and lots more mitochondria, which tends to look brown, and that's useful for steady endurance type activities. And so the red myoglobin and the brown mitochondria that makes those muscles look darker.
That's really really interesting. I love that that is the case for birds. What is your preference, Alex, dark meat or white meat or do you love them both?
I love them both differently. Yeah, it's just great. Yeah, yeah, I think because gravy too. Oh boy.
Yeah, it is pretty good.
And for the human eating end of it. So, wild turkeys are able to fly because they need to nest in trees. And then when we domesticated turkeys over generations, we made especially their breasts larger and larger and made them more top heavy to the point where they cannot fly. Sorry, but we only did that a few centes or millennia ago, and so they haven't totally lost those flight related muscles
when we're eating, it's just that they can't fly anymore. Yeah, And in particular, after World War Two, we figured out how to artificially inseminate turkeys, and so then we made them so lapsided they can't mate with each other without our help anymore. Yeah. The upshot, there is a lot of people think turkeys can fly because wild turkeys can fly, Yeah, but then domesticated turkeys cannot.
The extremely round, rotund turkeys that you see on sort of like a happy Thanksgiving card is not really the reality for wild turkeys. They are much more live and so yeah.
Yeah, they're like skinny looking, yeah, for.
A lot of domesticated birds actually, like you know, chickens as well, where like in other domesticated animals where we have like so like min max to them such that they are so meaty and like, yeah, there's like this like double musculature that they can struggle to like, they can't mate, so we've got to like go around with like a fake bird wiener.
It seems a little wild, guys.
Seems like maybe uh, flying too close to the sun right well.
Or not flying but yeah.
Or not flying and certainly not mating, being artificially inseminating too close to the sun.
The most famous story about Americans not understanding this is a piece of fiction that was based on reality. In nineteen seventy eight, CBS premiered a new sitcom called WKRP in Cincinnati, which was about a fictional radio station, and in their first season, they aired a Thanksgiving themed episode where the station does a promo of dropping turkeys from a helicopter as a gift to the community, like living turkeys. Oh no, yeah, but these are domesticated turkeys and fall to their death.
That's that's a solid joke. That's solid joke writing there.
It's probably the most iconic WKRP episode. There's a part where one character walks into the station afterward and says, as God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly. That's just great.
I've never seen this since yet. Somehow I think that has entered my consciousness at some point.
So yeah, I think that it's the famous one.
Yeah, famous one. Yeah.
And it turns out the writers wrote that because they heard about this happening in real life in Atlanta and turkeys. They pino shade turkeys. Oh gosh, yeah, either that or high buildings. And apparently that happened a few times across the mid nineteen hundreds US and so what you know this change people didn't totally comprehend or understand. Why would we do?
But was it the same reason as in the in the fictional show, Like, was it like turkeys for all and then we dropped them out of a bill ding?
Yeah, it was either promos for grocery stores or media you know it was it was stunts because because like the lion, as God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly like they thought it would be fine. Yeah, it wasn't intended to be brutal.
Guys, have you seen have you looked? Have you ever seen a turkey gracefully soaring overhead?
Right?
I get that there's the confusion because wild turkeys can fly.
A little bit. But also wild turkeys aren't great flyers.
They're really not built for like getting tossed out of a helicopter.
Yeah, they're they're borderline jumping into trees like they are flying, but it's not.
It's it's elegantly flapping their way to sort of an an elevated jump, you know, like they're they're able to dunk a basketball in with with a bit of help from flapping. It's not they're not, you know, gracefully soaring the skies.
That that should be the new puppy Bowl is turkey's dunking. It's gotta be blame dunk contest.
It's got to be the new air Bud's gotta be air.
Well and folks, that's two huge takeaways and a lot of numbers. We're going to take a quick break, then come back with a couple more quick takeaways. Round this off. We're back, and we're back with takeaway number three. Benjamin Franklin advanced his electricity experiments and sapped himself in a quest for tastier turkey meat.
Has been Franklin the one that wanted turkeys to be the USA's bird of the nation.
Let's go ahead with that because many takeaway number four Benjamin Franklin did not try to make turkeys the national bird of the United States. He succeeded. Right, everyone finishes the episode and everything's changed. There's turkeys on flags. Turkey, Yes, we go.
He finally did it.
This is a quick takeaway because it's a common internet myth. That's like making too much out of a real letter that Franklin wrote.
He was seriously into turkeys, though that part's true, right Yeah.
In that bigger takeaway, we'll talk about how much he loved eating them, and he was into them in general. So like it makes sense people have heard this myth, But all he actually did is privately criticize eagles and compliment turkeys. In one letter to his daughter, he did not like throw his body in front of the process to make eagles the national bird.
What was his problem with eagles. He's like, they're a bunch of jerks. They sound dumb because like every time you hear an that majestic eagle cry, that's actually red tailed hawk, right, they're like, bah, that's like, that's a red tailed hawk, whereas like actual eagle calls are like.
Yeah, and when James Bond punches or kicks a guy, they're actually breaking celery in the Foley studio end quote, Ben Franklin.
They're actually breaking a bald eagle over their knee.
Yeah, So he almost said those first things in the Franklin Institute is one source here in seventeen eighty four. In seventeen eighty four, Ben wrote to his daughter Sarah saying, quote, the bald eagle is a bird of bad moral character. He does not get his living. Honestly, he is too lazy to fish for himself. End quote.
I guess he observed a little bit of kleptoparasitism in bald eagles where they stole fish from another bird, and he judged them really judgaly, Yeah.
Of scientific observation.
Yeah.
Then the other thing is he later in the letter just brings up turkeys as a criticism of bald eagles. He says that the turkey is quote a much more respectable bird and withal a true original native of America. He is, besides, though a little vain and silly, a bird of courage end quote bird of courage. Yeah, he thinks turkeys are courageous. They pretty much are, I think. Yeah. The thing is, he just wrote this one time, in
one letter. He never ever said any of that publicly, and it just seems like a thought crossed his mind and he wrote it down. There was never a like Franklin for turkey's campaign button or something. This was never a like actual effort in any way.
He didn't start move dot org petitions.
Yes, yeah, he started a podcast about movies and folly art and then he started a move dot org petition. Move on whatever it, move on.
I don't know stuff anymore.
Yeah. And also the other thing I like about this myth is not only did Franklin not really push turkeys, his letter does have one, to my mind, inaccurate criticism of bald eagles, because when he's complementing turkeys, he says they're a true original native of America, which is true, bald eagles are also natives exactly. And yeah, especially before the heavy human development by colonizers in places like the US, bald eagles were endemic and a lot more of it.
They're still reintroduced your living in places like New York that were original thirteen colonies, Like bald eagles are also from here.
Yeah, they used to be like pigeons like everywhere, scrounged around your trash, just getting everywhere.
What a cool pigeon. Man. It's probably one of the most common turkey facts on the Internet, and it's just exaggerated. It's not really a thing.
Yeah, yeah, well you know, but he still liked them, right, and you're saying that he was trying to create the ultimate Like there's so many like turkey mishaps that people do, like when they try to cook turkeys, like ranging from just drying it out a bit, to like setting the entire neighborhood on fire because you tried to deep fry it in your driveway exactly. And it sounds like Benjamin Franklin started the trend of endangering yourself and others trying to cook a turkey exactly.
He's one of these guys. He invented stoves too. He was very interested in eating a lot of food, cooking and also electricity. And along the way there's this much more interesting true fact about Franklin and turkeys, where he was so bent on cooking them better than ever before, he electrocuted himself pretty painfully and learned a valuable.
Lesson, you know, knowing what I vaguely know about ben Franklin, like, I doubt that the electrocuting himself was a negative. I think he might have liked that little bit in a certain way.
He partied.
Yeah, he was a real bon.
And the key source here, along with the Franklin Institute, is Timothy J. Jorgensen. He's a professor of medicine at Georgetown University and award winning nonfiction author. He covers this in his book titled Spark, The Life of Electricity and the Electricity of Life. Because the famous Franklin electricity thing is in seventeen fifty two, he puts a metal key on the end of a kite string and uses that to conduct electricity from a storm into a container.
I watched that Disney short about the little mouse hanging out with Benjamin Franklin. I know my stuff.
Yeah, we can move on, Disney Master involved. Yeah, And the one piece of gear in that to mention is called a Leiden jar. It's named after a city in Europe.
Early in the seventeen hundred, scientists invented Leiden jars to contain electricity in a static states, and they would painstakingly rub things together or do other stuff to generate very small amounts of static electricity and fill one of these jars with it to the point where the jar could give you an actual shock, not like just touching a doorknob or something.
Right, So, like what I know about lighting jars is you have a fluid in it and then you have like a lid on it with sort of a metal ball on top of it, and the fluid contained certain sort of like mineral compounds that are meant to keep that charge in it. Yeah, and then you would just sort of like rub your socks on something then touch the light and jar and try to get that in there. But then if you touched it again, you'd get zapped.
Right, And when Franklin did his kite experiment in seventeen fifty two, he probably would have died or severely harmed himself if he hadn't had a previous experience with a turkey in seventeen fifty, two years earlier.
Turkey saved are one of our most hedonistic founding father's lives.
That's right. He never would have poinked everybody at Versailles without this life saving situation. And so in seventeen fifty Franklin says, I'm going to cook a turkey tasty, er and better than anyone ever has. What he did is he took a bunch of filled Leiden jars and arranged them to all zappa turkey to death and at least a little bit cook it too.
What you're oh my god, electric chair for the turkey where you're like you've been sentenced to the electric chair and you know, a nice four hundred and twenty five degrees for about four and a half hours. I don't know how to cook a turkey. It's longer than that.
But the all thing, yeah, yeah, that's.
What's the situation with this, Like what does the what did the turkey experience?
Yeah, it was like somewhat not experiment with electricity, but mostly a cooking experiment. And turkey was one of Ben Franklin's favorite foods. He also believed that most people would like decapitate a turkey and then cook it, but he felt that that gets you a less juicy turkey. What if you cannot like puncture the turkey in any way and electrocute it to death before cooking it?
Got this idea, he thought, Okay, well.
Which doesn't really make sense, but it was an experiment.
No, I mean, I guess it's like, ah, well, you know, if you xanguinate a turkey first, there's less like bloody juices in it. But what do you think is going to happen all those juices if you like, you know, completely, it's just going to like turn into a.
Balloon of hot turkey blood. Yeah, electrocution is not a hydrating experience. No, so, so Franklin says, yeah, I missed out this experiment. He did achieve at least one killing a turkey that way, and he said, now I'm going to dem it straight it to people. Very exciting.
Oh a live show fun. Yeah, why don't we do this at our live show? Electrocute a living creature on stage?
British laws stupid, British loves mad at the king. So the thing is, Franklin decides I'm going to start showing this off to people. But one of his first attempts to demonstrate it publicly, Franklin accidentally touches one of the wires that's connected to the turkey and then grounds his other hand so that all the Lyden jars electrocute him.
Mm. And so was he delicious after this?
Was he juicy?
Was his juiciness maintained during the kirking process?
I guess he said, so juicy he lived?
But that's oh man, I love that stays so juicy that you live. That's such a good that's such a good phrase. You know, stay ju see take that home stage you see folks say say say ju see and live.
Yeah. And he was basically lucky. This was a public demonstration, so people immediately helped him, you know.
But he do with a founding father who electrocutes himself like pokem with a stick, like wake up, wake up?
Yeah, nothing super helpful, but I think, like bring him water and stuff that'll help in this electrocution. Some water just keeps laughing him. Yeah. And he wrote a letter about this shortly after. In a letter to his brother John, he said, quote the company present say that the flash was very great, and the crack as loud as a pistol.
Yet my senses being instantly gone, I neither saw the one nor heard the other, nor did I feel the stroke on my hand, though afterward I found it had raised a round swelling where the fire entered as big as half a pistol bullet end quote. All right, well, like he had a visible this is where electricity went straight into me from my turkey execution apparatus. And then Franklin just stopped trying to cook turkeys this way because
he decided the lethal danger is not worth it. It's you know, he should find other ways.
To get his kicks, quitter coward.
And the thing is in his kite experiment. Two years later, Franklin made a points of using a piece of silk to manipulate the kite string because he had done further experiments and found out that the silk would insulate him from the electricity and he would be safe. And he mainly bothered to do that kind of thing because of his turkey accident. If he hadn't had that knowledge, a lightning bolt from a thunderstorm could have killed him. Yeah, he learned differently.
Well, that's a good lesson for you, folks. If you electrocute yourself trying to cook a turkey live, you know, take that and grow from it. Have a growth mindset.
And stay juicy. Have a growth mindset and a juicy mindset.
And stage Jose, stay juicy and live, folks.
I love it, folks. That's the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode with a runback through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, the bird name turkey comes from the name of the country Turkya and fifteen hundred's world trade confusion. Takeaway number two. Turkeys have both white meat and dark meat because wild turkeys fly a little bit.
Takeaway number three Benjamin Franklin advanced his electricity experiments and arocuted himself in a quest for tasty or turkey meat many Takeaway number four Benjamin Franklin did not try to make turkeys the national bird of the United States. And then so many numbers about turkey domestication, turkey blankets, the wild behaviors and socialization of turkeys, and more. Those are
the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fastening stuff available to you right now if you support this show at maximum fund dot org. Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the historical role of turkey in the first US Thanksgiving and the first Canadian Thanksgiving.
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fund dot org. Key sources this week include a lot of biological reference techs about turkeys and other birds, especially the National Geographic Field Guide to Birds of North America, also the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, more Ben Franklin resources from the Franklin Institute, and more. Well researched journalism from the New Mexico Wildlife Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, The Guardian, the San Francisco Chronicle, and more. That page also features resources
such as Nativedashland dot ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hoking, the traditional land of the Muncy Lenape people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, scatigoaqu people and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very
much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode and join the Free SIF discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join that discord. We're also talking about this episode on the discord. And hey, would you like a tip on another episode because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator.
This week's pick Us episode one ninety nine, that's about the topic of hyenas. Fun fact there, especially at the very end of it. Female and male hyenas are built very differently than most other mammals in just an amazing way biologically and socially. That is also, of course another SIFF episode about an animal. We do those sometimes. If you enjoyed this Turkey show or that Hyena show, I highly recommend my co host Katie Golden's weekly podcast Creature
feature about animals, science and more. Our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the Buddos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton durand special thanks to Chris SUSA for audio mastering on this episodisode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra extra special thanks go to our members. Thank you to all our listeners, and
a little programming note. Next week's show is going to be a special message from us and also something we built up extra special in the Maximum Fun Drive this year because a lot of good things happened in twenty twenty four is worth remembering that. So we'll bring you that next week. So excited to bring it to you, and in the meantime talk to you then.
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