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How wild turkeys went from extinct to everywhere in Minnesota

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Two turkeys appeared on the lawn in the half-light of the morning.

Vanishing North

An occasional series in the Star Tribune documenting the biodiversity crisis and the people struggling to head off extinction for Minnesota’s most vulnerable animals and plants.

They must have floated down from their roost nearby, somewhere up in the old oak trees that line the campus of the Minnesota Veterans Home in south Minneapolis. They were both toms — older males — and their beards scraped the grass as they walked up a hill to a small parking lot.

They ignored the employees, arriving to work and parking their cars. The people, too, didn’t seem to notice the birds pecking at the seeds and bugs in the spaces between brick pavers. The Mississippi River rushed by, down a ridge on one side of the parking lot. To the other side was the traffic of Hiawatha Avenue. The bells of the nearby light rail clanged.

The scene would have been unimaginable a few generations ago. Wild turkeys were nearly extinct — entirely gone from Minnesota and Wisconsin, along with most of the rest of the country. By the 1930s, about 30,000 remained — most of them in remote places like the Missouri Ozarks and the Florida Everglades. Many doubted they would ever been seen again in Minnesota.

Today, turkeys haven’t just recovered — their populations have exploded. To the delight (and annoyance) of many, the birds have made themselves at home in cities and suburbs. They’ve had to be shooed off the light-rail tracks. The flocks roaming the University of Minnesota campus have their own Instagram.

Their recovery is one of the greatest conservation successes in the history of the United States. They’ve done so well that now some question whether there is still enough space and tolerance in cities and on farms for a creature with something of an attitude that will, at times, act like the wild animal it is.

David Joles, Star Tribune

Wild turkeys were nearly extinct by the 1930s, but now roam south Minneapolis with flocks in the dozens. They have developed a routine, flying down in the early morning from their roosts in the oak trees near Minnehaha Creek to fan out in the surrounding neighborhoods.

Turkeys were killed out of Minnesota by a combination of over-hunting, disease and deforestation. The state tried reintroducing them in the 1920s and the 1950s, releasing farm birds in the hopes they could adapt to the wild. They couldn’t. Similar efforts failed in Illinois, Wisconsin and other parts of the Midwest.

In 1971, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources started working with the state of Missouri. They knew they needed wild birds, so they devised a plan that could have been drawn up by Wile E. Coyote. They baited the turkeys to lure them out in the open and then used cannons to shoot nets over their heads. Over a few years, the Minnesota DNR took 29 wild turkeys from the Ozarks and brought them to southeastern Minnesota. They thrived. The reintroductions continued.

At first, people thought the turkeys would only survive in southern Minnesota. But the DNR tried releasing them near St. Cloud, then near Duluth. They handled the winter just fine. In all, the DNR brought about 5,000 birds into the state. The state’s wild turkey population has grown to more than 70,000. Hunting turkeys in Minnesota — a dream throughout most of the 20th century — has become a spring tradition.

Turkeys also found a home in the city. Other birds brought back from the brink — bald eagles, sandhill cranes, wood ducks and trumpeter swans, to name a few — tend to stay close to lakes, rivers and wetlands. Turkeys appear as comfortable on a spot of grass between a light rail station and a bus stop in Minneapolis as they do in a cornfield or along a deer trail in the deep woods.

The turkeys in south Minneapolis follow such a predictable pattern that employees at the Veterans Home know which field they’ll be in at which times of day and where they’re headed.

On most days, they’re peaceful. But sometimes the birds get wound up. They’ll see their own reflections in the parked cars and attack. They’ll peck at each other, make a mess of the grass or charge the groundskeepers or residents with surprising speed.

The two toms nearing the end of the parking lot on that morning in late October trotted down toward Minnehaha Creek, where other turkeys were calling.

Across the creek and past the six lanes of rush-hour traffic on Hiawatha, a larger flock spread out. Six of the younger males — called jakes — crossed 54th Street together in single file, forcing a van and a sedan to wait. The jakes gathered on the sidewalk by the houses of a quiet lane as a runner jogged around them. Their goal: a birdbath near one of the garages. They each took their turns like schoolchildren, past the Weber grill and lawn chairs, to take a sip.

Descended from the few wild turkeys that remained by the 1930s in a few remote areas, the birds have made themselves at home in some of the busiest corners of Minnesota. They congregate in yards and boulevards, sometimes fighting or blocking traffic.

Three years ago in Moorhead, this conservation success story had become a nuisance. Turkeys were chasing kids and darting at letter carriers. Flocks in the dozens were tearing up the same yards over and over and leaving them littered with scat. The council tried to move 75 turkeys to South Dakota.

South Dakota didn’t want them.

So in 2020, the city drew up battle plans.

“Flares, bangers, crackers, popper shells, etc. can be temporarily effective in moving wild turkeys,” the city of Moorhead declared in its turkey management plan. Drones can be flown over their flocks to harass them. Remote-control cars and herding dogs will work, too. Bird spikes can be installed to keep them out from certain areas.

Moorhead Deputy Police Chief Tory Jacobson worked with the DNR to lay out every tool available to keep turkeys from taking over parts of the city. The DNR did an aerial survey of the turkey population, Jacobson said.

But it turned out that just one strategy was needed.

“A few good-hearted people were feeding them,” Jacobson said. Large flocks of turkeys were starting to rely on that food — taking the same routes each day to get there. They were getting territorial over it. After officers talked to those people, the feeding stopped. The wild turkeys of Moorhead now keep to the riverside. There hasn’t been a complaint since, Jacobson said.

It was late morning in south Minneapolis and the flock had grown to at least 25 turkeys. They moved from the area by a retention pond of the VA hospital, behind a bus stop and a construction site, to a quieter neighborhood. They fanned out across three front yards and curled up like cats to nap in the grass.

The fight started under a Little Free Library.

Two turkeys — both hens — went at it. The faster one pecked at the other’s back. They jumped in the air and kicked each other, crying out in scratchy wails as they raced in tight circles. The fighting made the whole flock uneasy. They got to their feet, taking up the sidewalk and spilling into the street. Two flew up into an oak tree, out of the fray. Four big toms that had been lazily pecking at seeds and bugs across the street suddenly stood erect.

A woman came out on her porch across the street with her arms crossed.

“You stay away from each other,” Rae Lundquist shouted to the fighting birds. “You’re all OK.”

The turkeys have sauntered through Lundquist’s neighborhood for years. They seem to come around more often since the drought started, cleaning up under bird and squirrel feeders. Lundquist had no idea that the birds were once nearly extinct — or that there were now about as many turkeys in her yard as the first reintroductions that sparked the recovery.

Turkeys have regularly visited Rae Lundquist’s front yard in south Minneapolis over the last four years. They hunt for fallen bird seed and bugs throughout the neighborhood, largely ignoring the humans they encounter.

But they’re one reason she loves Minneapolis.

“You get the night life and the city and all of that, but you also get the trees and real wildlife,” she said.

Scientists believe the closest living relatives to the Tyrannosaurus rex are modern birds like chickens and turkeys. You can see the resemblance up close, in their bony faces and deep-set eyes.

The four toms across the street had had enough. They puffed out their chests, fanned their tails and walked abreast across the street. They approached the two smaller fighting birds with a quiet haughtiness, as though they were aware their ancestors once ruled the food chain and that everything since that comet fell has been but a temporary disgrace.

The commotion stopped.

The birds all settled back down, at rest between a stoop and the sidewalk.

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Star Tribune

Coloring book duo teams up again to highlight St. Paul’s Rondo history

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Kosfeld used family photographs and old newspaper pictures as the basis for her illustrations. She also researched clothing of the period. It was important to her, she said, that her drawings “were respectful. No cartoons or caricatures.”

“Rondo,” Kosfeld said, “can be a heavy subject to some communities. But I wanted to show it was just beautiful. Playful.”

The project took nearly two years to complete from January 2023 to early 2024. Kosfeld and Kronick published the coloring book themselves. The Rondo book can be found at several shops and bookstores in St. Paul, including Next Chapter Books, Red Balloon, Wet Paint, Waldmann Brewery, Subtext Books, the Minnesota Historical Society gift shop and St. Paul Children’s Hospital.

Kosfeld is working on a third coloring book with a St. Paul focus, this one on the art, architecture and history of the St. Paul park system, to be published by the Ramsey County Historical Society.



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Star Tribune

Harris goes to church while Trump muses about reporters being shot

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LITITZ, Pa. — Kamala Harris told a Michigan church on Sunday that God offers America a ”divine plan strong enough to heal division,” while Donald Trump gave a profane and conspiracy-laden speech in which he mused about reporters being shot and labeled Democrats as ”demonic.”

The two major candidates took starkly different tones on the final Sunday of the campaign. Less than 48 hours before Election Day, Harris, the Democratic vice president, argued that Tuesday’s election offers voters the chance to reject ”chaos, fear and hate,” while Trump, the Republican former president, repeated lies about voter fraud to try to cast doubt on the integrity of the vote and suggested that the country was falling apart without him in office.

Harris was concentrating her Sunday in Michigan, beginning the day with a few hundred parishioners at Detroit’s Greater Emmanuel Institutional Church of God in Christ. It marked the fourth consecutive Sunday that Harris, who is Baptist, has spoken to a Black congregation, a reflection of how critical Black voters are across multiple battleground states.

”I see faith in action in remarkable ways,” she said in remarks that quoted the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah. ”I see a nation determined to turn the page on hate and division and chart a new way forward. As I travel, I see Americans from so-called red states and so-called blue states who are ready to bend the arc of history toward justice.”

She never mentioned Trump, though she’s certain to return to her more conventional partisan speech in stops later Sunday. But Harris did tell her friendly audience that ”there are those who seek to deepen division, sow hate, spread fear and cause chaos.” The election and ”this moment in our nation,” she continued, ”has to be about so much more than partisan politics. It must be about the good work we can do together.”

Harris finished her remarks in about 11 minutes — starting and ending during Trump’s roughly 90-minute speech at a chilly outdoor rally at the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, airport.

Trump usually veers from subject to subject, a discursive style he has labeled ”the weave.” But in Lancaster, he went on long tangents and hardly mentioned his usual points on the economy, immigration and rote criticisms of Harris.

Instead, Trump relaunched criticisms of voting procedures across the nation and his own staff. He resurrected grievances about being prosecuted after trying to overturn his 2020 loss to President Joe Biden, suggesting at one point that he ”shouldn’t have left” the White House.



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Star Tribune

How votes get counted in Minnesota on Election Day

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If that’s good, in many counties, election judges have a machine tabulate results, or count votes for candidates. In these counties, one copy of the tape the that machine prints in this process is taken to the central office. In most places, that is the county elections office. In others, the central office is the city elections office, which then reports to the county, Simon said.

Some precincts are close to the elections office, and some are far away, which explains some of the variation in when results show up.

But not every county tabulates at the precinct.

In Ramsey County, judges take the ballot counting machines from precincts to the county’s election office, Elections Manager David Triplett said. There, judges of different parties verify the machines’ seals, check the number of ballots against the number of voters that day, and if they add up, tabulate the votes.

“We have 100 receipts; we have 100 ballots. All right, go ahead and let’s report that result,” he said.

It is legal for precincts to transmit results to central offices online, but it’s rare, Simon said. And no devices used in the election can be connected to the internet while voting is in progress.



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