The Molts of Young Wild and Domestic Turkeys

The molts and plumage sequences of many gallinaceous birds have by now been adequately described.Experiments with the domestic fowl have yielded some of our best information on the physiology of molt and feather growth.But the molts of turkeys (MeZeagris guZZ@zvo) have never been fully worked out, and since the family Meleagrididae is probably phylogenetically more or less isolated from other families in the order Galliformes, it is not surprising to find in turkeys certain peculiarities of molt which are not characteristic of the fowls in general.The main purpose of the present work is to describe the various molts and plumages of the young turkey from the time of hatching to the attainment of sexual maturity in the first winter.Notes on the annual and prenuptial molts of adult turkeys are added, but insufficient material is available to describe these in detail.In addition, within this species some differences in the molting procedures of young Eastern Wild Turkeys (M.g. &vest&)and domestic Bronze Turkeys are shown, and evidence as to the nature and origin of these molting differences is presented.This report is an outgrowth of a study of hybridization between wild and domestic turkeys in the Ozark region of southern Missouri.Data on molting have been collected through two seasons, 1941 and 1942.A considerable part of this material comes from a flock of confined turkeys, raised at Lost Trail Game Farm, Reynolds County, Missouri, for sale as wild stock suitable for releasing.This strain, originating from hybrid parentage (domestic x M. g. silvest~is), has been carefully selected for color and gen-era1 appearance over a period of some thirteen generations, and it now closely resembles the native eastern race.The process of selective breeding toward the wild type has been accelerated by annually back-crossing part of the breeding hens to wild living gobblers in the vicinity of a state game refuge, a procedure also followed at the state turkey farms in Pennsylvania (Gerstell and Long, 1939) and Virginia (Mosby, 1941) .However, in certain details of morphology and behavior these birds still display evidences of their domestic inheritance, and, as will be shown here, they are intermediate in some aspects of molting behavior between domestic and wild turkeys.Therefore, for present purposes this strain will be referred to as "hybrid," with the understanding that at least in appearance the birds are more closely related to the native eastern race than to their more distant domestic ancestors.There is a basic sequence of molts and plumages apparently common to all turkeys, and the following accounts of the several molts are generally applicable to the species.The details were worked out largely in the hybrid strain, because it was most available for study.Differences in the extent or procedure of the molts in the wild and domestic strains are touched upon wherever they occur, but these are segregated for more complete discussion later in the paper.The molting terminology used here follows Dwight (19006) in most respects, but young turkeys pass through three molts before acquiring a stable winter plumage, the third of which is not supplied a suitable name by Dwight, and is here called the "first winter molt."Altogether, 194 birds were examined, over three-fourths of which were in some stage of active molt.Of these, 144 were hybrids from Lost Trail Game Farm, 32 were domestic bronze turkeys obtained from farmyard flocks in the vicinity of West Plains, Howell County, and 13 were native wild birds from various parts of Missouri.The remaining 5 were miscellaneous skins from other sources.The skin collections of the July, 1943