Lost In Coloration

My name is Chase Dunning, and I took my son Maverick Dunning, 5½ years old, on his first turkey hunt this season, and he pulled the trigger on his first longbeard! The bird came in 3 yards away from us strutting and drumming. A hunt that both of us will never forget. The bird had a 9½-inch beard and 1-inch spurs. Crazy color patterns on an Eastern shot in Butler County, Alabama.

We, too, noticed the light tips on the retrices (major tail feathers) and upper tail coverts on this 3-year-old gobbler. In general, we expect to see tail feather and upper tail covert tips that are chocolate brown to cinnamon brown when handling Eastern wild turkeys. This bird exhibited buff- or gold-colored tips on those feathers that appear to be more typical of Rio Grande turkeys or hybrids.

During my career as a wild turkey biologist I had the privilege to live-capture Eastern wild turkeys in four states and Gould’s turkeys in Mexico. I have handled a few thousand Eastern wild turkeys in banding operations for research and restoration work. Among those were birds from New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Georgia, Alabama and Arkansas. The vast majority of those Easterns exhibited the typical chocolate to cinnamon tips on retrices and upper tail coverts; however, a few had lighter tips on those feathers. The lighter tips were more often seen on juvenile hens than adult hens or gobblers, but an occasional adult male or female captured had coloration similar to Maverick’s gobbler.

There are a number of color variations among the various subspecies of wild turkey. Some of the notable ones like the smoky gray phase are the result of recessive genetic traits. In this case, we are likely seeing a genetic anomaly from somewhere in this gobbler’s family background. It is simply a slight variation in color, not an indicator of cross-breeding with domestic turkeys. Maverick has an unusual trophy for two reasons: color and the age of the successful hunter! Congratulations to this young man on his success and to you, his dad, for taking him out in the spring woods.