|Family XXX. PAVONINAE. PAVONINE BIRDS. GENUS I. MELEAGRIS,
Linn. TURKEY. THE WILD TURKEY. |Genus||MELEAGRIS GALLOPAVO,
Linn. The great size and beauty of the Wild Turkey, its value as
a delicate and highly prized article of food, and the
circumstance of its being the origin of the domestic race now
generally dispersed over both continents, render it one of the
most interesting of the birds indigenous to the United States of
America. The unsettled parts of the States of Ohio, Kentucky,
Illinois, and Indiana, an immense extent of country to the
north-west of these districts, upon the Mississippi and
Missouri, and the vast regions drained by these rivers from
their confluence to Louisiana, including the wooded parts of
Arkansas, Tennessee, and Alabama, are the most abundantly
supplied with this magnificent bird. It is less plentiful in
Georgia and the Carolinas, becomes still scarcer in Virginia and
Pennsylvania, and is now very rarely seen to the eastward of the
last mentioned States. In the course of my rambl