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Bartram describes a turkey

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blackpowderscout
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I started reading William Bartram's travels again and just finished the part where he describes the North American Turkey as opposed to it's European and Asian counterparts. That wasn't what really caught my attention. It was when he described the wild turkey that was hatched from an egg by a domestic hen chicken at the farm near the Altamaha and hung around. Thought it was kinda cool.

In case you aren't familiar withWilliam Bartram, this was around 1773...

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Iluv2hunt
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Sounds to me like a hen turkey laid an egg in a chicken nest, and the chicken hen incubated and hatched it

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blackpowderscout
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Yeah that's what happened, I just didn't explain it clearly enough.

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Iluv2hunt
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A baby turkey will latch on to the first living thing it sees as its mother
Watch this video when you got an hour to kill

http://video.pbs.org/video/2168110328/

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blackpowderscout
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I was out running here on base this morning and the gobblers were super busy!! It made me think of what it must have been like for Bartram along the St.Johns when he described hearing the gobblers in the morning and how there were so many of them it sounded like a thunderous noise for a hundred miles in all directions....

He mentions killing them as well as deer for food as if they were literally EVERYWHERE, so there is no question they were far more numerous then, what an Eden this state must have been like back then.

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