Sex & Relationships

The truth about wild turkey sex: Inside their kinky BDSM rituals

It’s a Tom-inatrix.

Don’t let their wholesome holiday image fool you — wild turkeys have a deranged sex life.

Type in “turkey sex” on YouTube and you’ll see gobblers fluffing up phallic facial erections, sadistically standing on their mate’s necks during intercourse and other acts that put Caligula to shame.

Let’s take a gander, shall we?

Breeding season for the dirty birds typically spans late spring and early summer, Modern Farmer reported. At this point, the older males — known as gobblers (which is coincidentally slang for a freaky form of fellatio) — focus on nothing besides getting jiggy with it.

To impress potential mates, horny suitors swagger about gobbling loudly with their chests puffed and their tails fanned out like burlesque get-ups in a display known as “strutting.” Their snood  — a fleshy appendage dangling from their beak — will also stand at full attention, which has led sophomoric Reddit users to dub it a “face boner.”

“The snood is a secondary sexual characteristic and serves to signal the dominance of the bird,” ornithologist Roger Lederer told Mel Magazine, adding “the longer the snood, the more dominant the male.” Sometimes the cranial codpiece isn’t enough, and the dominant male is forced to duke it out with other suitors, according to Lederer.

Wild Turkeys attempt to mate in Oregon.
Wild turkeys attempt to mate in Oregon.Alamy Stock Photo

If impressed with the total package, the female turkey — known as the hen — will sit down in the dirt, inviting her feathery bedfellow to climb aboard.

This is where things get interesting. The titillated Tom will literally stand atop his mate like a surfboard, while rubbing his engorged cloaca — a vent-like sex organ — against hers in order to thoroughly baste the babymaker.

The Tom can allegedly last up to 30 minutes — more than double the length of the average human hanky-panky session, Mel Magazine reported. Turkeys are also polygamous, with one gobbler able to fertilize up to 10 hens.

These dirty birds' sex acts put Bonobos to shame.
These dirty birds’ sex acts put Bonobos to shame.Getty Images

If that wasn’t kinky enough, male turkeys are most aroused by their mate’s noggin — and not in a brains-over-body way. A series of 1960s experiments showed that Toms tried to mate with just the taxidermied head of the female. The headless torso, meanwhile, had no effect on them.

Thanksgiving revelers need not worry if their holiday roast was “stuffed” before T-day. Unlike their promiscuous wild counterparts, the domestic turkeys from the grocery are artificially inseminated, Modern Farmer reported.

This is because the feedlot fodder are bred to be so big and buxom they’re unable to mate without injuring the female. Automating the process allows the Tom’s seed to inseminate more hens, sans the risk of them getting flattened by a behemoth butterball.

Happy Thanksgiving.