THE PROUD BIRD : The Bronze Age

I read somewhere that the last flock of American Bronze turkeys was kept by the poultry science department at Oregon State University. It turns out that that isn’t quite true, certainly not in the sense implied by the story--that when the flock was gone, so too would be the bird upon which Thanksgiving had been built. And it turns out that it isn’t quite true that OSU had the last American Bronze flock because what with budget cuts and all, the school sold the flock: 25 hens and 10 toms. The turkeys they now keep have unique genetic weaknesses, such as inherited disorders or distinct plumage.

“If you want to see the American Bronze,” I was told by the OSU turkey specialist, Dr. Savage, whose name is Tom, “get in touch with the Wishards in Prairie City. They have been raising them for 45 years. And one other thing . . . no, two. . . .

“The turkey is a very personable and intelligent bird, much more so than the chicken, say, or the Japanese quail. And it does not drown itself looking up into rain.”

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Prairie City, a small farming and lumber mill town east of John Day in east-central Oregon, is the home of Wish Poultry and the Wishard Family who keep the last great flock of American Bronze turkeys to be found in the nation. The American Bronze is the bird that made Thanksgiving what it is today, and while it is far from endangered, its numbers have dwindled to a pathetic low in the face of the industrialization of the turkey as a meat-producing animal. In the passing of the American Bronze can be found the gradual erosion of a style of American farming, the loss of the barnyard and the rise of the meat factory. If Thanksgiving has a flavor, we are no doubt losing that as well.

I called ahead before driving over. Marc Wishard described a narrow window of convenience through which he might be able to meet a writer interested in turkeys. The chicken slaughter was on one side, the opening of elk hunting season on the other. I arrived in between on a clear, warm Thursday morning. The Wishard place can be found behind the Prairie City High School gymnasium: a small house, a tangle of outbuildings, penned-in pigs, the big holding pen where the turkeys are brought in from the range for slaughter and where the breeding flock over winters. The sign at the entry read:

Hard Eye Ball Information

For Your Reaction

No Drugs Used

Natural, Organic, Real Safe, Fresh Fertile Eggs, Golden Fryers, Bronze Turkeys and Convenient Items

Nothing To Harm The Body

Guilty of Innocense (SIC)

Grow Your Own

Nonchemical

Poultry

Honest Show Biz

“Hoo Boy”

Hang in There

No T.V. 60 Minute Birds, sorry

“Hardly any more Bronzes growed,” Mark Wishard said, fixing me with a baleful stare across the small kitchen table. His father had started the turkey farm 45 years before. Mark, who looked to be in his early, road-weary 40s, had been a long-distance truck driver for 15 years and had come home to help his younger brother, Bard, with the business after the accidental death of their father four years before.

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“That power line hadn’t fallen on him, he’d still be running the place and you’d be talkin’ to him, not me,” Mark said. “We used to grow 30,000 turkeys a year. All natural. All naturally bred. Now we raise 2,500 and even that will drop now that the mill closed.”

So much of our national Thanksgiving meal identity comes to us from across the century, the grandmothers in their aprons lifting the roast turkeys from coal-burning ovens in family farm kitchens. Those birds grew up in much the same way as the American Bronze turkeys raised by Wish Poultry, and presumably tasted the same.

Before poultry grower co-ops were organized, farmers arranged their own markets, delivering carefully plucked birds with heads and viscera intact. During the Depression when co-operative marketing organizations took hold, turkey-killing crews, odd men at best, traveled from farm to farm and slaughtered the birds and ruffed the feathers, plucking the larger body and wing feathers that are favored by arrow makers to this day. A crew of women would then come in and pin, or finish plucking the carcass for the growers.

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The birds were not eviscerated, but were cooled down and delivered to a shipping station where they were graded, weighed and packed for shipping. Such was the “New York dressed” turkey. Evisceration was a housewife chore, an intimacy with where food comes from lost on the modern cook. As the farm changes, as the bird changes, as our relationship to the turkey changes, so too must Thanksgiving change.

The turkey the Pilgrims raised once they established their colony came to them out of domestic Mexican stock, with roots in wild Mexican stock. Of the wild turkey, there are five major varieties, the range of one of which extended at the time of the Pilgrims into New England. The Pilgrims brought over turkeys from England such as the Norfolk Black, a variety that still exists, and crossed them with wild turkeys.

As domestication of the bird increased in what would become the United States, the bird moved west with the population. Mrs. Marcus Whitman reported seeing turkeys at Fort Walla Walla on Sept. 1, 1836. They must almost have been big enough to slaughter.

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By 1846, turkeys were being successfully raised on the West Coast. They would have been tall birds, at least three feet from turkey feet to drooping dewbill, that odd, wiggly, fleshy protuberance that hangs down one side or the other of the turkey’s beak. They would have seemed black from afar, but on closer inspection a remarkably wide variety of coloring would have become apparent in their feathering: strokes of white, layers of buff, brown, and metallic bronze, blue-black, even rouge.

The Standard Bronze was recognized as a unique variety in 1870 by the American Standard of Perfection, the poultry equivalent of a pedigree, and became the common turkey throughout the country for any meaningful kind of meat production. It is the turkey most school children imagine each Thanksgiving, the one they draw in silhouette by tracing around their outspread fingers on black construction paper to represent the male turkey, the tom, hunkered down to puff out his chest and fan his tail feathers and turn his wattle scarlet red.

In 1928, a Whatcom County extension agent in Washington state happened to visit the Jesse Throessel farm across the border in British Columbia where he encountered toms that weighed 48 pounds and hens that weighed 25 pounds, or just about twice as much as they should. Throessel told the extension agent that his basic breeding stock had come from his brother in England, where the flock had been selectively bred for more than 50 years. The remarkable size had come from an early cross between the English Cambridge strain and the Standard American Bronze, and the subsequent strain had become known as John Bull. The Throessel strain was imported the next year into Whatcom County by a Lynden, Wash., farmer, who successfully crossed toms with his own flock, achieving a much larger bird within the same 26- to 28-week growth span.

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Two farmers in particular, one in Yakima County and one in Lewis County in Washington state, began working with the new strain in the early 1930s. One of them, Arthur N. Hamilton, took the new bird to the World Poultry Congress held in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1939. The Broad Breasted Bronze stunned the poultry world. As breeding stock became available and spread, first through the Pacific states, then across the nation, the Broad Breasted Bronze displaced the Standard Bronze as the American turkey of commercial choice.

The Broad Breasted Bronze didn’t last all that long. Within 20 years, it was displaced by its white-feathered equivalent, a preference of the turkey processors. White feathering is a recessive characteristic and, according to Harper, “it only takes two generations to put white feathers on a bronze bird.” The reasons for the selection were and remain purely cosmetic. White pin feathers aren’t all that visible on a turkey in a display case. The dark pin feathers of the American Bronze, at times visible, encourage a certain squeamishness on the part of the ill-informed consumer. When the American Bronze is processed on the young side, areas of dark pigment beneath the skin can look like bruising. Spokesmen for the commercial turkey industry explain the switch to the white-feathered bird as meeting the demand of the consumer.

When Mark Wishard speaks of his turkeys as all-natural, he means in part that his turkeys actually mate with one another, which is about as old-fashioned as the turkey business can get. At Thanksgiving, Mark and Bard select 155 egg-laying hens and 25 toms from the flock, and hold them over through spring to generate enough fertile eggs to produce the 2,500 turkeys the Wishards raise in a year. Any turkey not selected in fall for breeding is dead and processed by Christmas. “We only grow what we can kill and process ourselves,” Wishard said.

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The Wishards used to raise 30,000 turkeys at a time, but within the last 10 years it has become impractical to truck their birds to the processing plant in Salem. “Used to be there were all sorts of little processing plants scattered around,” Wishard said, “but they have been closed down and forced out. Then the trucking company went out. And we were taking our birds over there and they were just getting mixed in with the rest at the co-op. And these days these are special birds. The allergy people just love ‘em ‘cause there’s nothing in them that isn’t natural.’

That isn’t to say the turkeys raised by Wish Poultry are organic. While the Wishards mix all their own feed, the grain isn’t necessarily organically grown. But the way the birds achieve maturity is about as natural as turkeys can get this side of wild. When turkeys are labeled in the market as “all-natural” all that means is that no preservatives and no food coloring have been added. Otherwise the manufacturer has to list the ingredients, a list well worth examining on pre-basted turkeys.

At 10 weeks, the turkey poults the Wishards hatch are moved out of a wire-floored turkey house (probably the last of its kind on any commercial turkey farm in the nation)(ck w/ mh) and introduced to the 250 fenced acres of range land outside of town that will be their home until fall. Throughout the 28-week growth cycle, the Wishards move the water station and feeding troughs around, and the turkeys follow after, pecking the native grasses right back to dirt, snatching at unwary insects, digging in their manure with their big turkey toes.

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After leading me through the turkey house, showing me the incubator, explaining the stages of the slaughter on the small, efficient processing line, Wishard drove me out to the range land to see the birds. A sign posted at the gate read: “NOTICE, DOGS ON THIS PROPERTY SUBJECT TO DISPOSAL.” The rifle in the rack in the truck and the spotlight on the floorboards were not for poaching deer. They were for trouble. “We lost 100 birds in one night a while back,” Wishard said. “Some dogs got in there between the time I checked the birds at night and came back early in the morning. It’s like throwing good money down on the ground, that happens. A coyote’ll come in every once in a while and kill a bird, but he’ll only take the one, you know, to eat. I figure we all got to live. Dog’s are different.”

From afar, the turkeys looked like a mass of black-robed morticians hulking about. But as we drove into the range area and they spotted us, the turkeys moved in our direction en masse, pacing in our direction on long legs like the ballerina ostriches in “Fantasia,” their childlike curiosity completely getting the better of them. As they came near, the sun picked up and highlighted their extraordinary feather colors and the remarkable range of color in their old, bald, grandmother heads, the vibrant purples and blues and reds sliding into scarlet. The turkey can apparently change this head color in much the same way as a chameleon.

These birds were all big, quickly reaching the optimum 13 to 15 pounds for hens and 22 to 24 pounds for toms. Beyond that weight, all the Wishards would really be doing is feeding the birds grain they wouldn’t convert into meat. And in turkey farmer terms, that is a waste.

“As it is,” Wishard said, “we feed our birds about twice as long as the commercial tom that’s going to weigh more by 17 weeks. It takes about 100 pounds of feed per turkey to grow it out.”

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I looked out the rear window of the truck and a small sea of excited turkeys loped along behind. “We have the best flavored turkey in the world, right here,” Wishard told me in an absolutely matter of fact tone of voice. “That’s my opinion.” He may be right, but you have to go to Prairie City, Ore., to get the turkey to find out for yourself.

The truck slowed and we were soon surrounded by more than 2,000 curious birds, all of them standing at least three feet high. Never before had I been the focus of so much pure attention, if not outright adulation. They made me feel like the Mahdi returned. And when I stepped among them, slamming the truck door and startling the flock, their constant bubbly gobble exploded into high, piercing trilling, a sound like a space ship lifting off.

I felt like raising my arms and making a speech. But the only message I could have given the birds gathered around me was the obvious one, that their days were decidedly numbered.

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Wish Poultry turkeys are not available outside of Oregon at this time. The company has no distributor and cannot ship their product. “We’re 100 miles from an airport,” a spokeswoman with the company explained.