It is also probable that the beautiful ocellated turkey of Southern Mexico and Central America, may be an inhabitant of the countries south of Panama: as the same circumstances of soil, climate, and vegetation exist there, as in the habitat where it is found.
Latitudinally, the wild turkey was supposed not to extend beyond the line of the Rocky Mountains. This is an error. Although there is no account of its being met with near the Pacific coast of California, yet has it been shot upon the Gila River, which lies westward of the Cordillera.
Throughout all the original United States territory—the great forest-covered tract between the Mississippi and the Atlantic—it was one of the commonest birds in the times of the early settlements; and it is still far from rare, in those parts of the States where large patches of woodland extend between the sparse plantations.
Westward of the Mississippi, on the “timber” prairies—especially those interspersed with copses of pecan and hickory-trees, as also some of the acorn-bearing oaks—wild turkeys may be often encountered in flocks of from eighty to a hundred.
It has hitherto been taken for granted, that only two species of wild turkey (meleagris) existed:—that properly so called, and the ocellated, or “Honduras turkey,” already mentioned Of course, the tallegalla, or “wattled” turkey of Australia, is not taken into account in this enumeration: nor the common barn-yard breed, which has always been regarded as the mere domesticated variety of the meleagris gullipavo.
Discoveries, however, have lately been made by naturalists, which go far to prove that the wild turkey of North America is not only a distinct species from the domestic bird, but that the latter is of itself only distantly related to another species, equally distinct from the wild turkeys of the United States country east of the Mississippi.
That which has been found throughout Mexico—and northward upon the Gila, and the elevated table plains on both sides of the Rio del Norte—in short, throughout the Rocky Mountain district—differs in many respects from the bird of the Alleghanian forests. It is even plausibly proved that our tame turkey could not have descended from the wild species of the Atlantic States—one of the arguments being, that all attempts hitherto made to reduce the latter to the condition of a dunghill fowl—and they have been many—have ended in complete failure.
It is certain that the European breed was not brought from the United States. It was introduced as early as the year 1530, and must therefore have been transported across the Atlantic by the Spaniards—either from Mexico or the West India islands.
The Mexican wild species—if it be a different species—is in some respects more like the tame variety than that of the north-eastern portion of the Continent; and it is more probable, in every way, that the former is the progenitor of the domestic breed.
Another hypothesis is, that on their arrival in the West Indies, the Spaniards found tame turkeys stalking about the huts of the islanders; and that it was from these they obtained the breed, since propagated over the whole civilised world; and that the domesticated variety, as we term it, is not sprung from either of the wild breeds—Mexican or North-American—but is a distinct species in itself.