It’s nearly Thanksgiving in the US, so we thought we would take a different approach to a blog this week and talk a bit about history, turkeys, and trees. Okay we always talk about trees, but this time it’s more tasteful and only to be taken with a minor pinch of salt. And gravy.
For those who aren’t from the US/Canada or may otherwise not know, Thanksgiving is a holiday held in late November (October in Canada) that celebrates the final fall harvest before winter. It is meant as a day to give thanks for all that we have and spend time with friends and family around a table of delicious food. The very first Thanksgiving was held with European colonizers and Indigenous Americans in Massachusetts in 1621, over a period of three days. Their meal consisted of venison, assorted wildfowl, cod, bass, flint, and a native variety of corn which was eaten as cornbread and porridge.
There is a lot of history to unpack as to why this celebration happened, who it happened with, and what happened after, but for the sake of this blog we’re going to jump ahead a few hundred years to the early 1870s, and we’re going to focus on the New England region specifically.
By this point, New England was at its lowest level of tree cover in recorded history. Nearly half of the region's forests had been cleared for agriculture or settlements. Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts each had only 30% of their tree cover intact, and Vermont would reach similar levels over the next decade toward the end of the infamous sheep boom, which is an entire blog unto itself and a big part of why we have such wonderful merino wool socks to wear when the weather gets frigid. New Hampshire was reduced to around 50% tree cover, while Maine, the most northern New England state and least hospitable to agriculture, hovered somewhere around 75%.
It was around this time that railroads connecting the newly settled midwestern United States allowed agricultural products to be shipped to the east coast. A generational migration of farmers occurred where entire families moved out west to take advantage of cheap land and deeper, richer soils. As a result, most farms in New England would be abandoned over the next several decades, cemented by the Great Depression in the 1930s that saw many farms across the country close for good. These farms would gradually revert to native forest, though forest cover would never quite reach pre-European settlement levels.
Avid historians may remember that one of the items on the menu of the original Thanksgiving feast was wildfowl. Well, one of the common wild birds on the New England landscape in 1621 was turkey. It is also remarkably easy to hunt and does not migrate, which makes it an excellent source of food in late fall. As such, turkey was probably on the table over those original three days.
Today’s traditional Thanksgiving meals have done away with the venison, cod, bass, and flint, but the humble turkey has endured. Turkey has become the ubiquitous symbol of Thanksgiving to the point that 46 million turkeys are consumed each year on Thanksgiving day in the United States alone. Obviously, consumption at this scale requires industrial agriculture to supply it. In fact, for most of New England’s history (post-European settlement) farms would have been the only means of acquiring turkey on Thanksgiving. By the mid-1800s, turkeys had all but disappeared from the New England woods as agricultural expansion and overhunting decimated their population.
This brings us to the whole point of this blog. Benjamin Franklin even campaigned for it to be our national bird over the bald eagle, which as an aside, is just an oversized sea gull with flashy plumage. So beginning in the 1940s, conservation efforts began to re-introduce the species back into the New England landscape. After decades of effort, and some initial failures, the population of wild turkeys in the region has rebounded to the tune of hundreds of thousands across all six New England states.
The success of these conservation efforts was due at least in part to the rebound of native forests in the region. See? Our blogs always come back to trees. Native New England forests provide the food sources and habitat turkeys need to survive. Had we planted Eucalyptus or some other non-native tree species in all of those abandoned farms from 1870-1930, it is possible there would not have been enough high-quality habitat for the turkeys to rebound as successfully as they have. There is a lesson to be learned here for Afforestation, Reforestation, and Revegetation (ARR) projects around the world: A mix of native tree species provides benefits to the local ecosystem beyond just carbon, some of which may not be immediately apparent.
References
Foster, D. R., Lambert, K. F., Kittredge, D. B., Donahue, B. M, Hart, C. M., Labich, W. G., Meyer, S., Thompson, J. , Buchanan, M., Levitt, J. N., Pershel, R., Ross, K., Elkins, G., Daigle, C., Hall, B., Faison, E. K., D'Amato, A. W., Forman, R. T. T., Del Tredici, P., Irland, L. C., Colburn, B. A., Orwig, D. A., Aber, J. D., Berger, A., Driscoll, C. T., Keeton, W. S., Lilieholm, R. J., Pederson, N., Ellison, A. M., Hunter, M. L., Fahey, T. J. 2017. Wildlands and Woodlands, Farmlands and Communities: Broadening the Vision for New England. Harvard Forest Paper No. 33.
