It’s Thanksgiving Eve, so I suppose you expect me to dish out the usual stale, leftover poultry puns sandwiched between the same old turkey fun facts. Well, you’re right. So let’s not mince words and get right into the meat of the topic.
What is the deal with turkey and Thanksgiving anyway? I always heard they probably didn’t even have turkey at that famous first feast, dining mainly on seafood and deer brought by the Wampanoags. But William Bradford mentioned “great stores of wild turkeys” that fall leading up to the 1621 feast, and the official account of the first Thanksgiving by the Plimoth Patuxet museums says they “almost certainly” ate turkey. They must have really liked, it, too, because less than 20 years later the Wild Turkey was already hunted out and rarely encountered, then completely gone from Massachusetts by 1851.
Fast forward to the 1970s, and the state began reintroduction efforts wherein they kidnapped New York turkeys to release in Western MA. This explains why, to this day, Massachusetts turkeys will not root for the Red Sox. In the early 90s they finally got around to reintroducing turkeys here on the Cape. Since then, they’ve been gobbling their way into our hearts, pooping their way into our yards, and chasing away our postal carriers. Really – look it up.
No, really, we’re glad they’re back, sort of. But mainly we like to eat them. If you’re a highly pedantic person like me, you have probably enjoyed squashing the Thanksgiving myth that the tryptophan in turkey makes you sleepy, cornering some unsuspecting peripheral relative after dinner to say something like “you know, it’s actually a carb crash that knocks you out after dinner, not tryptophan.” Well, it turns out it’s a myth that that was a myth. In case that wasn’t clear, tryptophan does indeed cause drowsiness, enough so that there are quite a few published clinical studies showing that tryptophan can induce sleep at doses similar to what we’d get after gobbling up a good portion of Thanksgiving turkey. This is great news for those who like to blame the turkey when they pass out at Thanksgiving, ignoring the full bottle of wine and 800 grams of fat and sugar they consumed earlier.
At this time of year I’m ornithologically obligated to point out that the comical name of that disturbing fleshy bit dangling over a male turkey’s bill is “snood.” More disturbingly, Wikipedia insists on describing snoods as “pendulous structures of erectile tissue.” All the little red wrinkles on the male's head are called “caruncles,” of which the snood is the biggest example, the king of the caruncles, I suppose. A snood-curious professor at the University of Mississippi named Richard Bucholz has studied them extensively, finding that female turkeys prefer males with longer snoods, and that those longer snooded males in fact had better immune systems and fewer intestinal parasites. Hence that old saying, “it’s not the length of the snood, but the intestinal parasite load that counts.”
It's time to wrap this up so can you marinate in these fun facts for a while. Also, you should probably lay down – the Weekly Bird Report has been clinically proven to induce sleep twice as fast as tryptophan.
