Even if you've never watched the ‘80s sitcom “WKRP in Cincinnati”, there's one line you're probably familiar with.
"As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly,” says Dayton-native Gordon Jump, who plays WKRP station manager Arthur Carlson in the show.
The show – about a fictional Ohio radio station – went off the air 40 years ago, but it lives on in pop cultural memory, thanks to a make believe radio stunt in its iconic Thanksgiving episode.
In the first season of the show, Mr. Carlson planned a Thanksgiving promotion where the station would give away turkeys in dramatic fashion. The turkeys would be dropped from a helicopter to a shopping mall's parking lot.
Spoiler alert: as Howard Hessman's Dr. John Fever says in the episode, it didn't go well.
"If you've just tuned in, the Pinedale Shopping Mall has just been bombed with live turkeys,” Fever announces in the episode.
Can turkeys fly?
But, the joke may be on the TV writers. Rickey Kinley, one of the head bird keepers at the Cincinnati Zoo says the heavy bodied bird can, in fact, fly.
"They're just not great flyers,” Kinley hedged.
You won’t find a flock of turkeys flying south for the winter in a V formation. Generally, they have no reason to fly. They eat acorns and other seeds and bugs: all things that can be found on the ground.
"Turkeys have some of the shortest wings in proportion to body weight of most bird species. And part of the reason is their wings are mostly meant just for brief escapes from predators. So they're mostly wandering around on the ground, but if a predator or threat comes along they can have a very strong burst of flight."
Evolutionary exceptions
If birds don't have to fly, they won't. Flying takes up so much energy, Kinley said.
"Whenever birds are in an environment where they don't have to fly – meaning they have access to mate choices, they have plenty of food, and they have an absence of predators – they tend to lose the ability to fly.”
He points to ostriches and cassowaries as examples.
“The dodo bird is a perfect example of a bird that lived on an island that did not have the need to fly because it had no predators, and had plenty of food. Lost the ability to fly. But that came to its expense when sailors found dodo birds."
While evolution hasn’t taken turkeys’ ability to fly away, it has dulled it over time.
Farm raised turkeys can fly too. Though, because they’re bred for their meat, they're heavier and even worse at it than their wild counterparts.
"They definitely don't want to fly, but they can fly, it's just much harder for them,” Kinley said. “They can't fly very well, and, oftentimes, domesticated turkeys don't have a whole lot of need or opportunities to fly."
Not such a flop
That means the fictional turkeys in the WKRP episode did at the very least slow their descent after leaving the helicopter.
In the episode, award winning newsman Les Nessman, played by Richard Sanders, reports that the turkeys lived.
"I really don’t know how to describe it,” Nessman says in awe. “It was like the turkeys mounted a counterattack."
No actual turkeys were hurt, or even shown in the episode.
According to the Ohio Poultry Association, the Buckeye state is ninth in the nation for turkey production. The association reports nearly 19,000 jobs are created from the industry.
They declined to mention if any of those are helicopter pilots, or station managers.