Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Interesting sight...

Just saw a flock of wild turkeys down in the woods below our house. Two were white (true albinos ???) and the others were the normal brown / mottled. True wild albinos are pretty rare... about 1 in 100,000. Very interesting.

Tame birds are white. I’d think some of them getting loose or hybridized with some wild birds would be more likely than the odds you quoted. Still pretty cool, our turkeys are about gone around here.

Butterball genetics...farm animals.

cranes

Not all domestic turkeys are white, but a lot of commercial production is the whites.

We had a wild white turkey in the area of our farm a couple of years ago. Whether he was a true albino or not we never got close enough to find out. You could make out the various color patterns that a wild turkey has, his were just different shades of gray. The colors ranged from light gray to white. In the same flock there was a red color phase. the white turkey was seen as far away as 5 miles from our farm. People in the area call them grays. I've never heard of one being killed.
I have a friend that shot what turned out to be a farm raised domestic white turkey thinking it was wild. Ours didn't look like that at all.

Game warden told me to kill any white ones or partially white ones in season or out of season.


Must be more abundant than 1/100,000 here. I have one mixed into a brood of 70 birds a fee different times in random parts of of three counties just out driving around.

Then again, I may not be seeing a true albino.


The right approach is to whack em either way.

Thinking a true albino have pink eyes.

What a racist. They're all just turkeys, man.

Yep. Domestic turkeys are white. More likely that you saw 2 escaped domestic turkeys than 2 true albinos.

I know of a guy near me who shot a white one on his farm and was super excited to get it mounted. The taxidermist gave him the bad news..

On the opposite end of the spectrum I've seen an all black (melanistic) turkey once.

Out here in the pasture, we have two toms and two hens left over from last year's purchase. They are the white domestic variety. Though many domestic breeds are available to include bronze and bourbon red.

We also have a flock of seven wild turkeys which make a daily sojourn through the yard. There are a couple jakes and five young hens. They often jump the fence and feed with the domestics.

Since turkeys only need to mate once to fertilize an entire clutch of eggs, I expect it is quite possible one of the whites will nail one or two of the wild hens. Or even that one of those jakes could mount a white hen. Either way there would be a clutch of cross breed turkeys running around.

Again, “some” are white. We always raised broad breasted bronze turkeys. They look a lot like real ones. 😉