Florida Bullfrog
Crowing
I’m not trying to be argumentative, I just think its a worth-while debate. So please don’t take offense to my disagreement.since chickens are not native and many hawks do not even know what they are.
As to this point I would respectfully disagree for two reasons. First, it seems like many predators that are still around today are generally good at quickly adapting to new prey. Many or most domesticated animals aren’t native to the Americas. It doesn’t stop predators from quickly taking advantage of them. For example, I recently had occasion to research jaguar predation on cattle in South America. Generally, domestic cattle make up about 32% of a jaguar’s overall diet in the study-range, and 7% of all domestic livestock losses in South America are from jaguars and pumas. So those cats have quickly adapted to introduced prey items.
Second, wild turkeys are basically North America’s woods chickens. There are many birds of prey in NA that prey on sub adult and adult wild turkeys. For example, northern goshawks regularly kill adult turkey hens. So they already have a proclivity to prey on large galliforms. A chicken might as well be a small turkey to them.
Along those lines, wild turkeys can throw all sorts of color variants. Yet natural selection hasn’t favored the unnatural color variants. If predators were generally weirded out by the off colors, the off color birds should survive at a high rate and reinforce their colors into the wild population. There are faint color differences between different groups of wild turkeys across NA, but its a matter of them being darker in this habitat or lighter in that habitat. The color ranges between them aren’t dramatic. Just likely tweaked according to which colors are most camouflaged for the habitat in question.