“The great size and beauty of the Wild Turkey, its value as a delicate and highly prized article of food, and the circumstance of its being the origin of the domestic race … render it one of the most interesting of the birds indigenous to the United States of America.” — naturalist and artist John James Audubon in his classic Birds of America, published in sections between 1827 and 1838.
Read Audubon’s full entry on the turkey.
Get the inside, outsized story on how Audubon’s epic tome came to be — what’s a double-elephant folio? — in writer Erin McCarthy’s “The Book So Big It Needed Its Own Furniture” published by Mental Floss. (Image by Audubon from the book, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.)