Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. This is CBS Eye on the World with John Bachelor.

Here's John Bachelor.

The Wild Turkey, one of ten birds featured in a new book I highly recommend for Thanksgiving in any other time of the year.

Ten Birds that Change the World. Stephen Moss is the author, a distinguished author, an environmentalist, television

producer for the BBC Natural History Unit, and here to take us to the legend and

the facts of the wild turkey.

Stephen, a very good evening to your book is a joy and we're going to follow you through

history and across the continents but we begin with the wild turkey because I am familiar here in New

England. The wild turkey has re-established itself. You have some wonderful numbers to

say how it's come back with protection and habitat being protected in

some fashion. The wild turkey was discovered when Europeans came to America.

The wild turkey certainly is Europeans came to America.

The Wild Turkey certainly is a much more capable than given credit.

It's 2.5 to 5.4 kilograms and it lives in mixed forests. What did Europe make of the wild turkey

when it first heard about this and what did they make of the fact that the

Americans over that course of the 18th century decided to make the

Turkey a major piece of our legend?

So much so that it was almost, if this apocryphal is correct,

our national bird. Good evening to you, Stephen.

Good evening, John. I absolute privilege and pleasure to be here.

Well, the turkey, like all the birds in my book 10 birds that change the world, the turkey has an extraordinary history through time, through culture. It's a bird that of course is most familiar to Americans for Thanksgiving and to Americans

and the British and Europeans as a birdweed at Christmas.

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