Traditional turkey now a rare bird on dinner table

Every morning at 5, hours before he shows up to teach science at Calamus Wheatland High School, Glenn Drowns works his farm, trying to keep a well-known American bird from going extinct.

That would be the traditional farmyard turkey, revered each Thanksgiving as a symbol of American abundance but surviving only in small numbers.

Modern industrial versions of the bird are plentiful. Found plucked, dressed, frozen and shrink-wrapped in stores, often at less than $1 a pound, they are produced with almost assembly-line precision, 270 million a year.

But Drowns, 41, and other preservationist farmers fear the old-fashioned gobblers will vanish forever — unless more people are persuaded to eat them.
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