Eastern Wild Turkey

Eastern wild turkeys are the subspecies most people picture when they think "wild turkey" — the most numerous and widest-ranging of the bunch, at home in hardwood and pine forest from southern Ontario down through northern Florida and west into the Great Plains. Chestnut-brown tail tips separate them from other subspecies at a glance. Spring is when they put on a show: toms fan their tails wide, puff up every feather, and flush the bare skin of the head and neck through a shifting display of red, blue, and white — a performance built entirely to catch a hen's eye.