Editors note: In the summer of 2008, a tough turkey named Tom was terrorizing a Vineyard Haven neighborhood.

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to some temporary changes in state turkey hunting rules, while new regulations approved last year are now in effect.

For years turkeys have been setting up roost around the Vineyard in record numbers, roaming the fields and rural roads with impunity.

Armed with makeshift flags made of feed bags, a farm crew waved, herded, and cajoled 150 soon-to-be Thanksgiving turkeys down a woodland path.

Now that you have made many decisions about your Thanksgiving turkey, let me tell you a thing or two about the bird you are going to demolish.

Except for a single distinguishing feature, this turkey looks like any other in the flock that wanders through Vineyard Haven. But it's hard to miss the thin green arrow protruding from his haunch.

There was a time, in the not so distant past, when turkeys crowded more than just the roads of Martha’s Vineyard.

The story of a hostile, feral turkey that prowled the neighborhood of Old Ridge Road terrorizing residents with beak and spurs ended on Father’s Day, June 15, with its fatal shooting by Chilmark police officer Jeffrey Day.

Responding to a distress call about an aggressive turkey, Officer Day shot and killed the bird, though not until it had chased him and his partner officer Matthew Gebo around the yard and onto the hood of a police cruiser respectively.

Turkeys were in the news quite a bit this summer, and they have been in many stomachs recently. Flocks of live turkeys wander around in Tisbury, West Tisbury, Chilmark and to a lesser degree in Aquinnah, Edgartown and Oak Bluffs. Are these Island flocks wild turkeys? I would like to quote Vineyard Birds 2 which Barbara Pesch and I recently published. “The wild turkeys introduced by Gus Ben David from Arkansas in the 1970’s were extirpated in the ‘90’s. There are feral turkeys here.

While the bullet-riddled corpse of a feral turkey lies stiff in a Chilmark police freezer, a fuller picture of its violent past on Old Ridge Road and the surrounding neighborhood is emerging.