Wild Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo)

To our knowledge, wild turkeys have not been seen along the San Pedro River near Hot Springs Canyon for quite some time (maybe long-resident locals can inform us better), but Jim Flood caught these images of one above, near the river in March of 2010. So perhaps a population is moving downriver from the vicinity of Ramsey Canyon, where we photographed members of a well-known flock there (below) in March of 2009:

Sibley (2000, p. 149) says that the Southwestern variety of wild turkey have "tail and uppertail coverts tipped pale buffy or whitish, reacting a strikingly different appearance than the darker, rufous-tipped Eastern birds", and the drawings he provides fit all the birds you see above. His distribution map shows them as resident in our area.

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