Montana Viewpoint: Turkeys & Tourists
I don’t know when the Merriam turkey was introduced to Western Montana, but it was and they have prospered. I can vouch for it.
In the 1980s and ’90s I broke out about 65 acres of timberland into cropland and I planted a lot of oats to “tame the soil.” I put up a lot of the oats as hay and word spread fast in turkey-dom. In short-order my haystacks began to look like the rear end of a threshing machine because the turkeys scratched the bales to get at the oat kernels and popped all the strings. This meant that I had to use a pitchfork to load the hay onto a wagon.
I shall be forever grateful to Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, whose staff netted some 400 of them and relocated them to the Flathead where I am sure they were welcomed. To me, it was “good riddance.”
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