Celebrating Thanksgiving at LVNHM!

🦃✨ From all of us at the Las Vegas Natural History Museum, Happy Turkey Day! ✨🦃  

A wild turkey from The Las Vegas Natural History Museum's Repository collection.

Did you know?

• Our wild turkey specimen is a true feathered superstar with 5,000 to 6,000 feathers! 😲🐦

• While it is well-known that turkeys gobble, they are also capable of clucking and purring.

• Turkeys can run as fast as 18mph, and take off to as fast as 50mph in flight.

A Brief History:

 Did you know turkey wasn’t on the menu at the first Thanksgiving? When the Pilgrims and Wampanoag gathered in Plymouth, their feast included deer and “fowl,” likely ducks or geese. Turkeys didn’t take center stage until the 1800s, thanks to their abundance—over 10 million in America—and practicality for feeding families. Writer Sarah Josepha Hale helped popularize turkey by placing it at the head of a Thanksgiving table in her novel Northwood, and by 1863, when President Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday, turkey had become the holiday’s star. A delicious tradition was born!

Conservation Story:

While turkeys may be the centerpiece on Thanksgiving tables, wild turkeys once faced extinction in the early 1900s, with their numbers dropping to a mere 200,000. Thanks to conservation efforts like the Pittman-Robertson Act, this iconic bird made an incredible comeback. Today, their population soars at 6.5 million in the U.S., according to the National Wild Turkey Federation! 🌿🙌   

Let’s gobble up some gratitude for this conservation success story! 🦃