turkey the bird, not the country...

Before I left for Turkey, I was out for a walk in the nearby University of Wisconsin Arboretum. It's a place that's less than a mile from our house and provides an instant calm as it surrounds you with copious amounts and varieties of trees. I stumbled across these wild turkeys and was quite surprised to see how close they'd let me approach to take their picture. 

Scientific classification, Genus: Meleagris

Turkey (the birds) are native to the Americas. So, did you ever wonder where the name turkey comes from? The birds were erroneously identified by early European settlers as a type of guineafowl, which were also known as turkey fowl because they were imported to Europe from Turkey. The name stuck after all of these years. And interesting enough, the Turkish word for turkey (bird) is hindi which means Indian (as in India). It is thought the Turkish name arose from the early misconception that India and the New World were one in the same.

Sounds like these birds have had a bad case of mis-billing throughout the years and throughout cultures.