{"id":1000837,"date":"2007-08-31T06:41:16","date_gmt":"2007-08-31T11:41:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/birding\/2007\/08\/31\/a-turkey-in-manhattan\/"},"modified":"2008-09-03T10:32:44","modified_gmt":"2008-09-03T15:32:44","slug":"a-turkey-in-manhattan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/birding\/2007\/08\/31\/a-turkey-in-manhattan\/","title":{"rendered":"A Turkey in Manhattan"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last night I was walking through Battery Park on my way to a meeting when I noticed an unbelievably large bird strutting around the grass, apparently unconcerned with all the people, most of whom were equally unconcerned with it. It was, to all appearances, a Wild Turkey. This is the first one I&#8217;ve ever seen in Manhattan and only the second I&#8217;ve seen in New York City. (The first was in a remote corner of the Bronx Botanical Gardens in the late-eighties\/early nineties.) <\/p>\n<p><img src='http:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/08\/turkey1.JPG' alt='A Wild Turkey in Battery Park' width='640' height='456' \/><\/p>\n<p>I called it in to the rare bird alert, but apparently turkeys aren&#8217;t rare enough to qualify, even if they&#8217;re locally rare in downtown Manhattan. Lloyd Spitalnik did tell me one had been seen at this location last year too, so it may be the same bird returning.<br \/>\n<!--more--><\/p>\n<p><img src='http:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/08\/turkey2.JPG' alt='Wild Turkey' width='640' height='519' \/><\/p>\n<p>I did consider whether it might be a domestic escapee, or even one deliberately put there. Some parks introduce swans. Why not a turkey? It&#8217;s certainly not a typical domestic bird, which is usually white, larger, unable to fly, and often incapable even of feeding itself. I suppose it could be one of the heritage breeds though. Those are considerably less stupid than the genetically engineered meat beasts harvested on most turkey farms today.  <\/p>\n<p>If anyone wants to check it out, it was in the South end of the park, near South Ferry, on a large lawn that had been roped off.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last night I was walking through Battery Park on my way to a meeting when I noticed an unbelievably large bird strutting around the grass, apparently unconcerned with all the people, most of whom were equally unconcerned with it. It was, to all appearances, a Wild Turkey. This is the first one I&#8217;ve ever seen [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[410],"class_list":["post-1000837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birding","tag-flash"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1000837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1000837"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1000837\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1000837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1000837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1000837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}