Can Wild Turkeys Fly? How High, How Far and How Fast

Turkeys burst off the ground, beat their wings hard to clear the trees, then set them and glide, though most of their travel is on foot.¹ Below: how high, how far and how fast they fly, what has actually been measured, how they run, roost and swim, and why farm turkeys stay on the ground.

High enough to roost in tall trees, which is as high as they need to go. We found no measurement of how high a turkey can climb in open air; what has been measured is where they sleep. Rio Grande turkeys in the Texas Panhandle and Kansas used roost trees averaging 45 feet (13.6 m) tall, with the lowest branch about 11 feet (3.4 m) up, and hens in Oregon used trees averaging 108 feet (33 m).¹ Turkeys reach their perches by flying up to the lower limbs and then hopping and flapping from branch to branch to the spot they want.

About a mile. The longest single flight is estimated at roughly 1 mile (1.6 km),¹ and a South Carolina wildlife biologist puts it at more than a mile.² Most flights are far shorter: up into a tree, across a clearing or a stream, or away from a predator, ending in a long glide.

Turkeys fly fast, for a short time. The top speed given is about 59 mph (95 km/h), and speeds estimated by following turkeys in a car or by radar run from 31 to 55 mph (50-88 km/h).¹

The best first-hand measurements come from West Virginia in 1946. A biologist following flushed turkeys by car clocked a gobbler at 38 to 42 mph over about half a mile, and other birds at about 32 and 36 mph; a flock flying close together through the forest covered 722 feet in 17 seconds, about 29 mph. He noted that a turkey's size makes its speed easy to misjudge, and that, like a large airplane, it has to fly fast to stay up.³

Running is a turkey's first escape. Turkeys travel mostly on foot and run from danger, sometimes with the neck stretched out level with the back.¹ A South Carolina wildlife biologist says that over a short sprint a wild turkey can outrun a galloping horse. The figure of 25 mph quoted on many websites has no measured source that we could find, so we leave it out.

A turkey's wings are short, rounded and deeply curved, with a broad inner wing, built for a fast, powerful take-off rather than long flight. To launch, it crouches with the breast lowered, then straightens its legs, stretches its neck, opens its wings and spreads its tail; a few short steps and two or three hops end in a leap. It climbs at a steep or shallow angle with fast wingbeats, then sets its wings and glides to a branch or back to the ground. The wingbeats of turkeys flying up through the trees are loud enough to hear.¹

Turkeys sleep in trees almost every night. At about sundown a flock flies abruptly up into the lower limbs, then climbs limb to limb to its spot. Each bird settles its breastbone onto the branch by bending its legs, which curls its toes around the perch, and later tucks its head back under its long shoulder feathers. About half an hour before dawn the flock gives soft "tree yelps", a male may gobble, and they fly down to start the day.¹

They choose trees with big side branches. Eastern turkeys roost wherever night finds them, more often in conifers in the South and hardwoods in the North; Florida birds prefer cypress ponds; Rio Grande turkeys in Texas use cottonwoods along creeks. In winter, Minnesota turkeys picked roosts sheltered from the wind, often conifers on south-facing slopes.

Turkey chicks, called poults, fly remarkably early. A newly hatched poult already has its first flight feathers growing, because it will need them within two weeks. Florida poults could flutter into low cover at about 9 days, fly more than 20 feet (6 m) at 10 days, and fly easily into tall trees before two weeks old; hen-reared Eastern poults flew up to roost at 14 days.¹ Until then the brood sleeps on the ground under the hen. More: nesting and poults.

Commercial ones cannot. Farm turkeys are the same species as the wild bird, but breeding for heavier, broad-breasted birds has cost them the ability to fly, and their shorter legs make them poor runners, unlike the lean, long-legged wild bird.² In one study, domestic turkeys grew to more than three times the weight of wild-strain birds, and the one part of the body that grew out of proportion was the breast muscle.⁴

Turkeys can swim, though they rarely do. Adults have been seen swimming with their wings held tight, the tail spread and the neck stretched forward, kicking with their legs, and poults can swim at about 10 days old.¹ When they cross a stream, they usually fly, giving a cackle as they go.

1. McRoberts, J. T., Wallace, M. C., Eaton, S. W. (2020). Wild Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo), version 1.0. Birds of the World (A. F. Poole, editor). Cornell Lab of Ornithology. doi:10.2173/bow.wiltur.01
2. South Carolina Department of Natural Resources. What's the difference between domesticated and wild turkeys? (news release, 20 Nov 2023). SCDNR News. Accessed 26 October 2026. Source
3. Glover, F. A. (1947). Flight speed of wild turkeys. The Auk 64(4): 623-624. doi:10.2307/4080730
4. Stover, K. K., Weinreich, D. M., Roberts, T. J., Brainerd, E. L. (2018). Patterns of musculoskeletal growth and dimensional changes associated with selection and developmental plasticity in domestic and wild strain turkeys. Ecology and Evolution 8(6): 3229-3239. doi:10.1002/ece3.3881