My brother in law, John, described a collision with a wild turkey as “cartoon like.” It was an explosion of feathers. The car concealing cloud of plumage may have looked like something from Loony Tunes, but it was far from funny. At highway speed it’s a potentially deadly impact. One turkey can be 4 feet long from beak to tail, and weigh over 20 pounds. The front of John’s car was crunched and the impact had even damaged his radiator. In fact, police have suggested that turkey collisions can be more dangerous than deer collisions. This is because the huge low flying birds can crash right through your windshield filling your car with feathers and glass shards. If you see a turkey, slow down. There is very likely more than one.
Turkeys are an exception. Unlike most species of birds, they have been on the increase thanks to lack of predators, ample habitat, and re-establishment efforts. In the early part of the 20th century, these huge birds had all but disappeared from Illinois, but now there are turkeys throughout the state… (I’m strictly referring to birds here). They can be found in large flocks right in Peoria. On a November walk in Forest Park, I saw upwards of 40 in a single flock foraging through fallen foliage, where they glean acorns, insects, and anything else that might look edible.
A single hen can lay a dozen eggs. All species produce excess offspring in order to replace those lost to such things as predation, starvation, and disease. Limit these limiting factors and overpopulation becomes a problem as too many of the young survive. Just about any population could proliferate, mushrooming to such a degree as to impair or even endanger other species. This poses a very real land management challenge.
Turkeys are branching out and, like deer, have become a road hazard. One hope is that turkey and deer hunting can result in sufficient “predation” to reduce both habitat damage and road risk.
In this month of Thanksgiving it’s well to reflect on turkeys. Regardless what we may wish to believe, we are not above the laws of nature. Unfortunately we operate on an erroneous economic model based on endless growth as our holy grail. A healthy economy is said to be a growing economy. This has been such a common theme for the past couple centuries, that we accept it as gospel. And yet common sense tells us that continuous growth is impossible on a finite planet, just as bacteria can’t outgrow their petri dish. Growth for its own sake is a dead end. Cancer is just one example of the end result of run-away growth.
Turkeys share one thing with us humans. We are the opposite of what zoology professor, Dr. Robert Paine called a “keystone species.” Keystone species are those species that have a disproportionate impact on their particular ecosystem. If they are removed, the entire system could suffer, or even collapse. Examples include both plants and animals. For example, a predator such as the sea otter protects kelp forests by eating sea urchins, which could damage the kelp, which, in turn, is crucial to many species. Prairie dogs provide burrows used by many species. There are specific plants that provide nectar at crucial times so pollinators can survive to perform their vital function throughout the rest of the growing season.
Turkeys, if allowed to reproduce unchecked… have potential to be a destabilizer. Their presence can do what a keystone species’ absence can do… harm nature’s balance. We have that same potential, to destabilize.
On Halloween this year, the world’s human population reached 7 billion. We are now rapidly heading toward 8 billion. It had taken until just 200 years ago to hit a billion for the first time ever. A mere hundred years later, in 1900, our numbers had reached 1.6 billion. Then, in 2000, just a decade ago, the numbers had reversed and stood at 6.1 billion. This tells a truly scary Halloween story… as Pogo would say, “we have met the enemy… and he is us.”
And it’s getting worse. There could be 15 billion of us by the year 2100. How is this possible in a finite world? Meeting the basic needs of so many more… means more of everything… more growing, more shipping, and more distributing of more food while providing more clean water, more health care, and more shelter — all without inflicting more damage on our already depleted and ever shrinking environmental resources. We all know this is not possible. According to Worldwatch Institute, there is basically no more arable soil left to cultivate, fresh water is becoming rare, foods are becoming in short supply, ocean fisheries are severely depleted and are declining, forests are disappearing due to high demand for building material, fuel, and space.
Well-intentioned people are busy eliminating suffering by reducing such human population limiting factors as malaria. But mortality is just one side of the equation. Unless they expend an equal effort at also reducing natality, the end result will be more suffering in the long run. This Thanksgiving, besides being grateful for what we have, check out these web sites that help shed some light on how we might build a better future.
http://www.un.org/esa/population/
“…democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people into the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. It doesn’t matter if someone dies. The more people there are, the less one individual matters.” Isaac Asimov
“We must alert and organize the world’s people to pressure world leaders to take specific steps to solve the two root causes of our environmental crises – exploding population growth and wasteful consumption of irreplaceable resources. Overconsumption and overpopulation underlie every environmental problem we face today.” Jacques-Yves Cousteau