Envisions of a week away from classes and thoughts of Thanksgiving dinner are filling the minds of many students.

While everyone knows the mainstay of this traditional holiday has always been a large, roasted turkey, few know anything else about the popular bird. In fact, there’s a lot more to these gobblers than meets the eye.

Jerry Sell, distinguished professor of animal science, said the turkey tradition is as old as the holiday itself. “It goes back to the Pilgrim times, when they and the Indians got together. The Indians enjoyed turkeys, in fact, they domesticated them, so they shared them with the pilgrims.”

Today, he said, turkeys are on an upswing. Total production has increased dramatically in the past 20 years, and so has consumption. “Eighteen-and-a-half pounds per person per year are consumed annually,” Sell said.

There are several reasons for the popularity of the bird as a year-round snack. “Turkey is a very lean meat,” Sell said, “and that is an attraction.”

Another factor contributing to their popularity has been innovative processing and marketing by producers.

One example of this, which Sell cited, is the development of such sandwich cuts as thin-sliced breast meat.

While bird production in the U.S. has been growing about 5 percent annually, per capita consumption has been holding steady. There is a growing use for the excess birds, however. Sell said “a lot of turkey goes to export. Mexico imports more U.S. turkey than any other country.”

Turkeys are raised quite differently from other meats, such as ham and beef.

“The majority of turkeys are produced by large organizations that contract with producers to grow the birds,” Sell said. “One corporation might own a lot of different segments of a single operation, such as the hatcheries and feed mills.”

No parts of the bird will be put to waste. As Sell explained, the by-products such as skin and entrails are recycled into animal feed, sometimes even for the turkeys themselves.

The domestic birds that people generally associate with Thanksgiving have a wild cousin. Unfortunately the wild variety has not had it as easy as its domestic counterpart.

Wild turkeys “have really only been back in the state since the late 1960s and early 1970s,” said Jim Pease, assistant professor of animal ecology.

He said the birds were basically eliminated due to unrestricted hunting in the 1900s.

They were slowly reintroduced to Iowa about 30 years ago and flourished so much that by 1974 restricted hunting was allowed.

“In the last seven years, the whole state has been open to spring hunting,” Pease said. Each year 30,000-45,000 Iowans hunt wild turkeys.

There is another problem facing these birds besides hunters. Many of the birds now live on Conservation Reserve Program land, land which farmers have taken out of crop production and converted back to grassland.

A reduction in the amount of these lands has been anticipated. “The CRP land could go out by literally hundreds of thousands of acres in a single year,” Pease said.

He explained that these lands have been used because they are prime growing areas for insects, the mainstay of a young chick’s diet. “For a chick to grow, it requires tremendous protein supplies, and it can only get that from eating insects.”

Overall, Pease seemed optimistic about the future of the wild turkeys. “It’s been a real success story,” he said.