The Wild Turkey and Its Hunting

“This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1914 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER IV THE TURKEY HISTORIC HAVING disposed of such records as we have of the extinct ancestors of the American turkeys -- the so-to-speak meleagrine records -- we can now pass to what is, comparatively speaking, the modern history of these famous birds, although some of this history is already several centuries old. We have seen in the foregoing chapter that all the described fossil species of turkeys have been restricted to the genus Meleagris, and this is likewise the case with the existing species and subspecies. Right here I may say that the word Meleagris is Greek as well as Latin, and means a guinea-fowl. This is due to the fact that when turkeys were first described and written about they were, by several authors of the early times, strangely mixed up with those African forms, and the two were not entirely disentangled for some time, as we shall see further on in this chapter. In modern ornithology, however, the generic name of Meleagris has been transferred from the guinea-fowls to the turkeys. These last, as they are classified in "The A. O. U. Check-List of the American Ornithologists' Union," which is the latest authoritative word upon the subject, stand as follows: Family Meleagrid DEGREESe. Turkeys. Genus Meleagris Linnaeus. Meleagris Linnaeus, Syst. Nat., ed. 10, 1, 1758, 156. Type, by subs, desig., Meleagris gallopavo Linnaeus (Gray, 1840). Meleagris gallopavo (Linnaeus). Range.-- Eastern and south central United States, west to Arizona and south to the mountains of Oaxaca. a. [Meleagris gallopavo gallopavo. Extralimital.] b. Meleagris gallopavo silvestris Vieillot. Wild Turkey [310a]. Meleagris silvestris Vieillot Nouv., Diet. d'Hist. Nat., IX, 1817,447. Range. -- Eastern United States from Nebraska, Kansas, western...”