wholelottagobble

Last year at a friends spot there were 4 white, 2-year old longbeards. They were obviously from the same hatch and would gang up and run the other 4 or so gobblers away from hens and some of the others were monster 3 and 4 year old birds. My friend ended up killing one of the big birds and finally one of the white nes he was after also. It is beautiful and i ought to scan a picture and post it. Anyways, around here in about every flock on different farms...there are at least 2 or 3 sometimes 5-10 white hens. It seems to be very common. In almost all videos and magazines i never see these. So in the areas ya'll hunt, do ya have white hens or no? I'm just curious to see thanks guys. And when i say white i don't mean straight albino...i mean that white mixed with a smokey gray.

totoe

...Sounds domestic....they are not any in these parts...that i have saw..

wvdeerhunter22

I saw two last year, one hen, one gobbler, only a shot beard,4-5 inches at the most, it was grayish. Both of them had the smokey grey color on their wings and tips of the tail feathers. I was in Jackson county wv, its in the western part of the state

mnsterbuckslayer17

havent seen any white ones here in florida.

FroMan

I would seriously bet that it's a domestic interbred with a wild turkey.

We got a half white/half brown turkey around my house that runs with a wild flock. It didn't have a beard but it's a tom...it's alot bigger than the other wild ones too.

Go ahead and wax one...get a full body mount for him.

Bobgobble2

Heres a great pic of 2 Easterns I posted a couple of months ago!There definately out there...

BuckoDuck

I killed a solid white turkey in north central Missouri last year. It was a jake that the land owner had been seeing since it was a poult the year before. It was with 5 other jakes when I shot it. Everything on the bird is white except for the legs and neck and head which were an off pink drab color. The eyes and beard (4 1/2") were black. I'm waiting to get it back, any day now, from the taxidermy shop. That's a once in a lifetime bird I just had to get mounted.

JoeA

In the natural world, albino (no pigment at all) & leucistic (a rarer condition; no pigment in body covering. these individuals will be white with dark eyes) individuals have recessive genes for pigmentation. A single indivudual may pass on some of these recessive genes into the population; but they'll will soon "fade" as their expression is masked by the more dominant genes for coloration.

Often times, there are multiple genes for coloration and the more "white-lighter" ones an organism has, the lighter its color will be. Hair color in people is a good example.

If the number of "white" individuals is high enough, that characteristic will express itself more often than in a population with lower numbers or one "white" gene source.

From the sounds of it and the image posted, it looks like there's 2 possibilites goin on in your area's turkey flocks. One, there was a large infusion or a steady small infusion, of white individuals (domestic or naturally expressed mutations). Two, the light to white color is the result of a problem somewhere in the genes that code for the pigmentation (some possibilities: don't make the color or make the wrong color) in the affected individuals.

That the mutation is so evident in many areas leads me to assume that you may not have much of a predator problem there, which is in general a good thing turkey-wise.