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No one wants a weasel on their Thanksgiving table, but swapping turkeys for other animals was once surprisingly common.
Trading turkeys–for wildlife management, not dinner–was a key part of one of North America’s biggest conservation success stories. After dwindling to a few thousand birds in the late 1880s, the wild turkey population has grown to about 7 million birds in 49 states, plus more in Canada and Mexico, according to the National Wild Turkey Federation.
In many cases, restoration relied on trades. The exchange rates varied, but Oklahoma once swapped walleye and prairie chickens for turkeys from Arkansas and Missouri. Colorado traded mountain goats for turkeys from Idaho. The Canadian province of Ontario ended up with 274 turkeys from New York, New Jersey, Vermont, Michigan, Missouri, and Iowa in exchange for moose, river otters, and partridge.
West Virginia, in particular, appears to have had an abundance of turkeys to share. In 1969, it sent 26 turkeys to New Hampshire in exchange for 25 fishers, a member of the weasel family once prized for its pelt. Later trades involved otters and bobwhite quail.
“They were like our currency for all our wildlife that we restored,” said Holly Morris, furbearer and small game project leader at the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources.
Wild turkeys were abundant across the U.S. until the mid-1800s, when the clearing of forestland and unregulated hunting led the population to plummet. Early restoration efforts in the 1940s and 50s involved raising turkeys on farms, but that didn’t work well, said Patt Dorsey, director of conservation for the National Wild Turkey Federation’s western region.
“That’s when we started capturing them out of the wild and moving them around to other places to restore their population, and they really took off.”
Turkeys play an important role in a healthy ecosystem as both predator and prey, and are a popular draw for hunters, said Dan Ellingwood, a biologist with the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department. But the restoration effort is also important just for the sake of ensuring native species continue to persist, he said.
This article was provided by The Associated Press.