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Ocellated Turkey — printable fact sheet
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Ocellated Turkey
Meleagris ocellata
Meleagris ocellata is not just a colourful wild turkey — it is a separate species restricted to the Yucatan Peninsula and adjacent Guatemala and Belize, and it is far more visually extreme than its northern relative. The male has a bare blue head studded with orange-red caruncle…
Did you know?
- The Ocellated Turkey is found only in a small region of Central America and cannot be found in the wild anywhere else in the world.
- The eyespots on the tail are structural rather than pigmented, and the whole bird changes colour with the light angle, going from copper to green to violet as it turns. Ocellated turkeys nest on the ground and the hen incubates a clutch of 8 to 15 eggs alone, but unlike the northern species the male may remain nearby. There is no domesticated ocellated turkey — every turkey eaten worldwide descends from the Mexican subspecies of Meleagris gallopavo, domesticated by Mesoamerican peoples long before European contact.
What I learned
Draw the ocellated turkey
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