Wild Turkey Print

Plate One. When Audubon began The Birds of America, the Wild Turkey came first. A bird big enough to fill the largest paper ever printed, and grand enough to deserve it.

Meleagris gallopavo is North America’s own. The body looks brown from across a field and turns to bronze, copper and green the moment the light moves. The colour is structural, built from the way each feather scatters light, so the bird changes as it walks. The bare head shifts red to blue with its mood. A mature tom carries a beard of modified feathers from his breast and stands the better part of a metre tall.

Benjamin Franklin thought it the more respectable bird, native and brave, where the eagle was, in his words, of bad moral character. The turkey lost that argument and won the continent anyway. Hunted to near-collapse by the early twentieth century, it was brought back by careful restoration until it now walks woodland edges in every mainland state.

Drawn in the Audubon tradition, where the weight of a bird’s history is carried by the accuracy of its line.