By Keith Roulston
The other night, in the midst of a startlingly beautiful sunset, my wife called me to see a couple of dozen wild turkeys in the corn field to the west of our house, as seen through the large windows of the rear addition of our country home.
The next day, about a dozen of the flock were in our orchard, scratching among the residue of last year’s apple crop for something to eat before sauntering down the lane.
The sight of wild turkeys isn’t exactly rare at our house, but it’s still unusual enough to have us watching for a few minutes. We’ve lived here for nearly 50 years and for the first 25 we never saw turkeys. Though native to our area, the last wild turkey had been recorded in 1909.
Like the passenger pigeon, turkeys had been hunted into extinction by early settlers. There had been so many of them, who could imagine they could kill them all, and there were no restrictions on when, and how many turkeys you could kill – until they were killed off.
I remember the first releases of wild turkeys by Ministry of Natural Resources staff in the early 1990s. Somewhere, back in the files, we have a Rural Voice with a cover shot (still black and white back then) of turkeys being released after being captured down in the States and trucked to Ontario. They were released on the edge of the Maitland River valley so they could have a favourable habitat.
There was no hunting allowed of these first releases but who could expect them to reproduce so quickly. In hardly any time I remember farmers complaining they’d become so prolific that they were eating out of the feed bunks on some cattle farms, frightening off the cattle that were supposed to eat there.
Soon hunting seasons were allowed again – but not the unrestricted hunts that helped lead to their temporary extinction. There are now an estimated 70,000 to 100,000 turkeys in the wild in Ontario.
But turkeys are another case where farmers in slower-growth areas are protecting a species on behalf of the entire population. Areas of farmland which are being rezoned for urban growth and covered by acres of highways, houses and apartments aren’t going to be welcome for the bird. Yet farmers are among the most loyal voters for Ontario Premier Doug Ford, a downtown Toronto politician who seems to see farmland only as a potential area for urban settlement and not as a precious resource to feed our urban dwellers.
Many of those urban residents don’t think much about the food farmers grow, either, as long as the shelves are full at their supermarket. They do worry, however, about the turkeys, deer and other species that exist only on that farmland. They aren’t nearly as supportive of species like raccoons that live in urban attics and feed from their garbage, adapting to the conditions of cities.
We got wild turkeys back after nearly a century of them being missing from our landscape, but they are endangered in a different way in the 21st century. Year by year hundreds of acres are lost to urban development, squeezing the growing of food and wildlife onto a smaller and smaller acreage.
The federal government is also a factor in this. It’s hard to imagine but Canada's population may reach between 42.9 million and 52.5 million in 2043 and up to 74.0 million in 2068, according to some forecasts. That means expanding urban growth, covering Ontario’s limited farmland. It means less land for farmers to grow food, unless we suddenly get an enlightened government that steers urban development to less productive land.
I won’t live to see that growth. Meanwhile, I’ll just watch out the window to see the turkeys and the deer, the squirrels and the rabbits and the many song birds that make life in rural Ontario so interesting.◊