The pilgrims who settled in Plymouth, Massachusetts celebrated their first harvest with a Wild Turkey - not as a dinner guest, but as a main course.

The turkey received a better deal in 1776. In determining the national bird, Congress was split among the bald eagle, the dove, and Benjamin Franklin's candidate, the Wild Turkey. The eagle won to Franklin's chagrin, not the bird he saw as "a more respectable bird and a true original native of America."

Ebeneezer Scrooge gets the credit for putting turkey on the yuletide menus of England. When the redeemed miser gifted the Cratchit family with an enormous dressed turkey in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, the bird became a popular Christmas dinner entrée. Turkeys made their way to the White House in 1877. The presidential china of President Rutherford B. Hayes was decorated with turkeys!

The Wild Turkey's range once covered 39 of our present states, extending from Canada to Mexico. The coming of European settlers spelled disaster for the turkey. The birds were heavily hunted and their natural habitat cleared for farmland. Domesticated birds brought along new diseases that spread to the wild population.

Things looked pretty bleak for the bird Franklin put on a pedestal. The Wild Turkey's range was reduced to one-tenth of its size and it had disappeared completely from half the states where it originally lived.

Around the turn of the 20th century, new laws limited turkey hunting, wildlife reserves were set aside, and wild birds were released into new areas.

The Wild Turkey's tale ends happily. Careful management of the birds and the land resulted in increasing populations of these magnificent birds.