What Is a Group of Turkeys Called? Flock, Rafter and Gang

Each name below comes with the earliest printing we could find, so you can see which are old and which are recent, followed by where oddities such as "dole" and "death row" come from, and then what a turkey flock really is: who is in it, how big it gets, and when you are most likely to see one.

Flock is the plain, correct word, for wild and farm turkeys alike, and it is also the oldest. The earliest use we found is from 1657, in a history of Barbados that writes of how "to drive a flock of Turkies".¹ Biologists say flock too.

Probably not because turkeys perch on roof beams. The earliest printing of "a rafter of turkeys" that we found is in a list of group names in a 1908 book on English birds, which says the old fowlers seem to have coined these terms; but the word appears in none of the older lists we checked, from the 15th century to the late 1800s.² Of the four dictionaries we checked, two list the turkey sense, and the American Heritage Dictionary derives it, probably, from raft in the sense of "a great number", so a rafter of turkeys would simply be a lot of turkeys.³ The writer James Lipton made the same point in 1969, in an excerpt from his book of group terms, An Exaltation of Larks: "Probably not what you think, if you see birds sitting on a beam."⁴

Some websites trace "rafter" to a Greek word meaning "stitched together". No dictionary we read says so; the roof-beam rafter is an Old English word.

Gang is the old American word. John Lawson, exploring the Carolinas, wrote in 1709 of "meeting great Gangs of Turkies".⁵ In 1821 an American farm paper described "the gang of turkeys" being driven through tobacco fields to pick off the worms,⁶ and in Davy Crockett's 1834 memoir "a large gang of turkeys rose from the cane brake".⁷ In 1895 a correspondent from San Francisco described gang as the word old hunters in the western states used.⁸ Some websites say gang refers to the birds' noise; we found no source for that.

No. Gaggle is the old term for geese, on the medieval lists. We found turkeys called a gaggle only as a joke or figure of speech, from the 1970s on.

The 15th-century "terms" lists, such as the Book of St Albans of 1486, were drawn up before turkeys reached Europe, and none of them names the turkey.⁹ They do have "a dule of turtles": turtle doves, from the French word for mourning. In an English book on field sports, published in 1801-02, the sportsmen's list it prints reads "a dule of Turkies" instead,¹⁰ the earliest turkey version we found; later books repeated it, and it is the likely source of "a dole of turkeys".

The rest of the terms you see online are recent. "Posse" and "crop" turn up as group terms in a 1975 dictionary of collective nouns, after older writers used "posse" now and then in passing; "raft" appears in a 1959 word book; "muster" belongs to peacocks in every old list; and "a death row of turkeys" was a deliberate joke in a 1991 edition of Lipton's book. We found no record of "a Thanksgiving of turkeys" as a group term. None of these is wrong to use for fun, but none is old.

Our search covered the Internet Archive's full-text library and Google's book counts; we could not search every archive, so an older printing may yet turn up.

Wild Turkeys are highly social, and their flocks follow the seasons. In spring and summer, a hen raises her brood alone, and broods often join into bigger flocks of hens and young. In late fall, the young males, as big as their mothers by then, leave to form flocks of their own; adult males gather in small groups of their own, often just a few birds. Eastern hen flocks in forest country reach about 40 birds, and on open range in Texas, Rio Grande brood flocks join into winter groups of 200 or more. In April, the winter flocks break up again.¹¹

Males and females each sort themselves into a pecking order, and fights settle who is on top. Among Rio Grande turkeys, groups of males, often relatives, even fight other groups as a team and rise or fall in rank together.¹¹

Winter is the best time: flocks are at their biggest, and they feed in the open, in fields and clearings and at woodland edges. Look in the first two or three hours after dawn, when they leave the roost, and again in the evening, when a flock flies up into the trees to sleep.^{12, 11} More on that: turkeys roosting in trees.

Farm turkeys are the same species, but commercial breeds are so heavy and broad-breasted that they cannot fly.¹³ About 199 million are forecast to be raised in the US in 2026,¹⁴ far more than there are wild turkeys.

A poult. A male turkey is a tom or gobbler, a female a hen; a young male is a jake and a young female a jenny.¹⁵ For more on the birds themselves, see the Wild Turkey guide and nests, eggs and poults.

1. Ligon, R. (1657). A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbados. London: Humphrey Moseley. Accessed 26 October 2026. Source
2. Horsfield, H. K. (1908). English Bird Life. London: Everett. Accessed 26 October 2026. Source
3. American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th edition. rafter. HarperCollins. Accessed 26 October 2026. Source
4. Lipton, J. (1969). An exaltation of larks. Natural History 78(6): 8. Accessed 26 October 2026. Source
5. Lawson, J. (1709). A New Voyage to Carolina. London. Accessed 26 October 2026. Source
6. American Farmer (1821). (worming tobacco with turkeys). American Farmer 2: 383. Accessed 26 October 2026. Source
7. Crockett, D. (1834). A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett. Philadelphia: E. L. Carey and A. Hart. Accessed 26 October 2026. Source
8. O. (1895). (reply on group terms). Notes and Queries, 8th series 8: 192. Accessed 26 October 2026. Source
9. Hodgkin, J. Proper terms: an attempt at a rational explanation of the meanings of the collection of phrases in "The Book of St. Albans," 1486, entitled "The Compaynys of beestys and fowlys," and similar lists. Transactions of the Philological Society 1907-1910, Supplement: 1-187. Accessed 26 October 2026. Source
10. Daniel, W. B. (1801). Rural Sports, vol. 2. London: Bunny and Gold. Accessed 26 October 2026. Source
11. 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
12. Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Wild Turkey. All About Birds. Accessed 26 October 2026. Source
13. 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
14. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (2026). Turkeys Raised (released 25 September 2026). USDA NASS. Accessed 26 October 2026. Source
15. Indiana Department of Natural Resources. Turkey terms and turkey talk (turkey ID graphic, March/April 2021). Indiana DNR Fish & Wildlife. Accessed 26 October 2026. Source