From the mouths of Birds

[Terrance]

Ben Franklin's choice for our national bird, the wild turkey
(Meleagris Gallopavo) has not always had an easy time
finding a place in its homeland. Native to only North
America, the wild turkey became popular game for early
colonists, who found easy targets with the abundance of
animals and birds in the New World. As the colonists began
to stake territory and set up farms, villages and eventually
cities, they destroyed the turkey's crucial food and nesting
sites in forests and waterways. Eventually, the industrial
revolution polluted many of the country's rivers, further
reducing endangered flocks. Turkey populations  declined
because of wide-scale logging, illegal poaching and hunting,
poor habitats and even the devastation of the Civil War and
Great Depression, when food quality was sparse and the
turkey was considered an easy catch and good eating.

"...Perhaps a more comely beak, fuller feathering, capacity
for flight, however brief...details of Design. Or, had we
but found savages on this island, the bird's appearance
might have then seemed to us no stranger than that of the
wild turkey of North America. Alas, their tragedy is to be
the dominant form of Life on Mauritius, but incapable of
speech. That was it right there. No language meant no chance
of
co-opting them to what their round and flaxen invaders were
calling Salvation. 
Did we tell them "Salvation"? Did we mean a dwelling forever
in the City? Everlasting life? An earthly paradise restored,
their island as it used to be given them back?
Probably...Otherwise the dodoes would be only what they
appear as in the world's ILLUSORY LIGHT (my Caps)---only our
prey. God could not be so cruel." GR.110-11


"The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon
the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there -- there
you could look at a thing
monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were --
No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the
worst of it -- this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It
would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun,
and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the
thought of their humanity -- like yours -- the thought of
your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar.
Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough
you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the
faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of
that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it
which you -- you so remote from the
night of first ages -- could comprehend. And why not? The
mind of man is capable of
anything -- because everything is in it, all the past as
well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear,
sorrow, devotion, valour, rage -- who can tell? -- but  ruth
-- truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape
and shudder -- the man knows, and can look on without a
wink. But he must at least be as much of a man as these on
the shore. He must meet that truth with his own true stuff
-- with his own inborn strength. Principles won't do.
Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags -- rags that would fly
off at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate
belief. An appeal to me in this fiendish row -- is there?
Very well; I hear; I admit, but I have a voice, too, and for
good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced.     
		--Joseph Conrad, Heart Of Darkness