The Wild Turkey & Thanksgiving

If you were to Google “Wild Turkey Symbolism” you’d find that one word, Abundance, continues to repeat itself. This is more than ironic given the fact that just a few short decades ago, Wild Turkey numbers weren’t anywhere close to what we are fortunate to experience today or what the first settlers experienced centuries ago as they roamed through some 290 million acres of the Southeast dominated by Longleaf Pine: forests that had been managed by natives who understood and appreciated the importance of prescribed fire and the role it plays for wildlife, especially the Wild Turkey.

Today, I think about the first Thanksgiving – what it meant then, what it means now. Like a lot of you, I’d like to go back in time to experience this “New World” and these new friendships that were taking shape. In the blink of an eye, after that first day of celebrating an abundance of new relationships and a world filled with abundant populations of wild animals, things changed. Over-hunting and a loss of habitat in the wake of industrialization would lead to many negative changes across these American lands. That was the case for quite a bit of the 18th and 19th centuries. And, to make things worse, the fear of prescribed fire that spread like wildfire in the early twentieth century, left the future of the most significant symbol of the Thanksgiving Holiday in extreme jeopardy.

Through it all, the thought or meaning that surrounded the first Thanksgiving somehow survived, even in the midst of decimating many of the native peoples who had helped to shape the lands and wildlife populations that we would come to love and call our own. I’m glad it did. Today, as everyday, I am thankful for my family, friends, landowners, and for the wildlife that I love, especially the Wild Turkey. Every time I am lucky enough to take in the grandeur that this majestic bird encompasses, I think about its meaning to me and, moving forward, the new-found meaning of abundance that I recently came across. May your Thanksgiving be filled with an abundance of family, friends, good health, and wild things.

Happy Thanksgiving from our family to yours!