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1880 to the modern record
The going: Chapman in 1880 already writes the turkey in the past tense of habit: it "has almost entirely disappeared" from the county, though "in an early day they were in abundance." The state record completes the sentence Chapman began: by about 1900 the wild turkey was extirpated from Indiana altogether, gone with the clearing of the forests and the market gun. For the first half of the twentieth century there were no wild turkeys in St. Joseph County at all — the big bird of the oak openings survived here only as a farm animal's wild ancestor in books.
The return: The restoration was again a numbered state program: between 1956 and 2004 the Indiana DNR released 2,795 wild turkeys at sites across the state, birds trapped from surviving populations elsewhere, and the releases rebuilt a statewide, huntable population from zero. The turkey's present standing in this county is documented in the county's own bird record: when Potato Creek State Park was designated an Important Bird Area in 2006, the citation named the wild turkey among the park's native resident birds — the restored bird listed, in a modern survey instrument, as part of the county's ordinary avifauna, in the southwest county woods a few miles from the ground where Chapman watched it disappear.
Sources:
- Chapman, History of St. Joseph County (1880), Chapter II, pp. 340–343.
- Indiana Department of Natural Resources, wild turkey species and restoration accounts, in.gov — extirpation by about 1900; 2,795 turkeys released 1956–2004.
- Potato Creek State Park, Important Bird Area designation, 2006 — wild turkey among the resident birds named.