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[bitmasher]

I have not hunted turkey; however have any of you hunted and served wild turkey for Thanksgiving?

Hunting gobblers sounds like a tasty endeavor to me...

[cob]

I've never hunted turkey either but they say the meat isn't very good. they say its very stringy and tough. Of course where i live we have 105 degree summers and 0 degree winters so any wildlife has to be pretty tough to survive.

[bitmasher]

Ok, thanks for the info, I have heard they are pretty good to eat, but maybe the guys I talk to just like to eat tough stuff. :wink:

Guess I'll just have to get a tag and find out for myself...

With my luck they will taste like sage brush.

[expatriate]

Could be the difference between Texas turkeys and Colorado turkeys. I couldn't believe the difference in taste and tenderness between Minnesota whitetails raised on alfalfa and corn versus Montana mulies raised on sagebrush. I thought at first that my meat had gone bad.

What I'd like to know is why domestic turkeys are famously stupid, yet wild ones are supposed to be quite challenging to outwit. From what I understand about farm turkeys, it's a wonder the species survives in the wild.

[cob]

I've heard that about the domesticated turkies(is that how you spell it?) also. They say any loud noise can literally scare them to death. they must be extremely inbred or something.

[bitmasher]

You are probably right Expatriate, although I don't know from experience. I think Maineguide said awhile back that deer in Maine occasionally taste like cedar! That blew my mind, considering that I have always associated cedar with the smell of chests and new furniture.

Cob, I had read somewhere that domesticated turkies are really inbred, they have been bred to have these huge breasts so they are basically top heavy and can't walk around very well, compared to wild turkies. Now what would Darwin say about that (breeding for big breasts)? :wink:

As for the turkies and being scared to death. I have heard that about geese (wild or otherwise), had to do with the birds inability to dispel lactic acid fast enough when it becomes suddenly stressed (loud noise causing shock). Tried to find something about this on the Internet but came up cold....

[expatriate]

Bit, I think I see where you're headed on the possible inverse relationship between breast size and intelligence. I've seen that trend displayed in nature quite often myself.

I don't know about geese, but I do know that the AR activists and celebrities came out of the woodwork a few years back when the Air Force was proposing building a bombing range in the Southern Idaho desert -- one of the most isolated areas in the country. The argument was that even though impact areas would be small and no live ordnance would be used, the jet noise would stress native bighorn sheep populations so badly that they'd abort their fetuses, need counselling, etc. When I heard that I looked out my living room window at the flightline two blocks from my house. We somehow managed to increase family size from three kids to four in spite of all the stress and having to turn up the TV during takeoffs. I guess humans are immune.

What really took the wind out of activist sails was to take them out to the existing bombing range with a pair of binoculars. "Look over there by yonder bombed out tank...what do you see? It's a little herd of deer! To heck with the noise; they're browsing on a target! They don't look the least bit nervous, do they?" That pretty much ended the argument right there, but there's always more activists.

[ This Message was edited by: expatriate on 2002-12-04 22:44 ]

[bitmasher]

:smile: Chuckle....

Yeah as I was trying to find something on killing geese by scaring them to death and was coming up cold I was wondering if maybe that was an urban legend. However, where I heard this was while I was taking a biochem class and we were studying the tca cycle, of which lactic acid is a product. The prof told the story about how geese would die if they are scared by loud noise because, they get a adrenline hit, which cause their tca cycle to go annoxic and push out lactic acid faster than they can oxidize it. pH of the blood gets to acidic and they die (humans just pass out and start breathing).

This may just be pure crap though as I think about it. With all the problems some areas have with canadian geese, seems like if this lactic acid stuff were true, a couple guys could go around banging pots and pans and the geese would drop dead. Population problem solved...

One of the chief arguements for not drilling in the alaska national wildlife refuge (ANWR) is because it will screw up the 'bou herds up there. Same arguement was used when they went into Prudhoe Bay, except 30 years of human activity and studies have shown that the 'bou don't give a damn about pipelines and people, the herds have actually grown larger during the time of study.

[expatriate]

I'd never heard of such a thing, but there's a lot of stories like this one and turkeys (sheep, too, for that matter). There may be science to back it up somewhere, but it just doesn't seem likely from a Darwinian sense that a prey species would be prone to drop dead when startled. Nature favors those that use an adrenaline rush to advantage.

But if he's right, maybe the whole lead/steel/bismuth/tungsten argument is moot, and what we really need for geese is louder ammunition. Or maybe just forego the shot and just launch bird bombs into goose formations. If one could get the altitude and lead right, he could probably bring down six or seven at once! This would also solve the problem of picking pellets out of meat.

With a little genetic engineering, we could probably also import this trait into the deer herd and solve the road kill problem. Thus, when startled by a car, a deer would simply keel over dead instead of running into the road.

That reminds me; in all seriousness I read in an article that armadillos are prone to roadkill because their instinctive reaction when startled is to jump sraight into the air a foot or two. If they'd hunker down the car or truck would pass over them, but instinct kicks in and that's all she wrote. I've seen dead armadillos along the road, but haven't lived in the South enough to verify if the reflex contributes to it.

[cob]

i've never seen an armadillo jump. all the road kill dillas i've seen were squished by tires.

[bitmasher]

Yeah the whole idea of loud noise equating to drop over dead, just doesn't sound right. Perhaps it is true in certain situations where the animal really is caught by suprise. Seems that geese (or other animals) that had a "loud noise" deficiency would get weeded out of the food chain pretty quick.

I lived on the TX gulf coast for awhile and was amazed at the amount of armadillo road kill. Far higher than deer road kill on stretchs of rural CO hywy, by rough estimate. On some stretches of road it seemed like you could count the dead 'dillos by the mile.

As for introducing a "honk-to-kill-the-deer" gene into the cervids, that certainly would be a clever idea, but it would positively start a war with the AR.

[cob]

Road kill dillas are all over the place down there and in arkansas. In some stretches you can't see the stripes in the road for all the blood. Its really nasty, I guess there's just not much they can do about it.
My wife said she saw on the news a few years ago about the turkies dying from noises. I guess they interviewed a guy around thanksgiving that raised them and he explained why there's so many more people that raise cattle and it was because the turky are sooooo stupid it takes more to keep them alive and well.

[expatriate]

On the other end of things, you'd think that if loud noises caused prey species to spontaneously expire, predators would be a lot louder and make sudden movements, rather than being slow and stealthy.

As for genetically manipulated deer, I can only imagine the AR call for more humane horns on cars. Of course, at the other end of the spectrum would be the bubbas that would send off to JC Whitney for air horns in the 400 dB range to put on the truck.