By Darwin's Lights, This Is Our True National Bird

    On this day of Thanksgiving, let us choose to accentuate the positive.  It's all too easy to be a downer. As that lately late Sultan of Style, William Safire, once noted, anyone can be a nabob of negativity. Yes, the pasha of palaver and practitioner of "opinionated reporting" had it right: criticism comes cheap.

     It would be so easy, for instance, to lament the mass slaughter of turkeys that precedes this sacred national day. But let us look at the sunny uplands of turkeydom. For a humble fowl who once came in a distant second to the bald eagle in the race for national bird, the turkey has had the last laugh. (If you doubt me, click and hear for yourself!)

     Sure, 45 million gobblers found themselves with plunging necklines this week. But that's less than 20 percent of the 270 million turkeys strutting around farmyards in this great nation of ours.  And before you weak-kneed, pallid vegans (c'mon, you know I'm just kidding) start moaning about factory farming, let me add that there are another 7 million wild turkeys out there, having themselves a wild time out there in the, uh, wild.

   Meantime, how's our avian icon doing? Not so hot. A mere 70,000 bald eagles cling to life in this wicked world of ours.  For those of you who dislike counting zeroes, that's 1 percent of the wild turkey population.

   And no wonder. In the Darwinian sweepstakes, gobblers are winners.   Wild turkeys will eat just about anything they come across. They've even been known to eat a lizard -- and like it! Bald eagles, on the other hand, are boringly narrow in their diet: carrion or carry out. That's it! They only eat fresh meat, and half the time that's what kills them. If they feed on a carcass shot by a hunter, the lead pellets can prove fatal. Similarly, if they happen upon a dead coyote poisoned by a rancher, it's lights out.

   Eagles get all the style points, of course. Turkeys can't soar, and they walk like overgrown pigeons on crack, but when needs must they can run at 25 miles an hour and fly more than twice as fast.  When's the last time you saw an eagle run?

    As for popularity, sure the eagle brand is everywhere, from stamps to football uniforms, but what of that? Britney Spears was just as popular, and look where it got her: in and out of rehab, the custody carousel, and bald as an eagle!

    Granted, the turkey fails to command public adoration. We can only imagine how cruel Simon Cowell would be if a turkey ever turned up on American Idol. Yet, the only two authentic geniuses in American public life -- Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln -- both championed the turkey.

    Franklin nominated it to be the national bird. Alas, hotter heads prevailed. As so often happens in American elections, they chose looks over merit.

   Abraham Lincoln, ever the wise politician, didn't attempt to overturn that decision. He probably figured that abolishing slavery was about as much change as the public could handle. But Lincoln did get his beloved son Tad a turkey to keep as a pet in the White House.

   And, having declared Thanksgiving a national holiday, he became the first president to issue a pardon to that very same turkey. I suppose they had bison steaks for dinner instead. 

   So this Thanksgiving, let us raise a drumstick in salute to the turkey -- survivor, thriver, and friend. If we are what we eat, maybe Ben Franklin was right after all: we are our own national bird.  Happy Thanksgiving, fellow turkeys!

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