I have a longstanding interest in learning about and seeking to understand the Cambridge-area wild turkeys. Today, I wanted to try to learn more about the roosting patterns of the turkeys. In general, I know that wild turkeys roost in trees in the evenings primaily to protect themselves from predators. But I’ve only seen them up in the trees myself a few times (once around Linnean st I think, another time near Oxford street). I was curious if there was other information online from folks about where the Cambridge turkeys roost at night.

I tasked Claude with investigating and had it put together this rough map from a variety of publicly-available reports online (e.g. Reddit, iNaturalist, news reports). Of course, there’s not much of a way to verify any of this, and this investigation does not claim to be exhaustive or particularly systematic. Instead, I’m treating this as a starting point; I would like to investigate some of these locations for myself and see what I can see.

Anyhow, here is the map:

View the map full screen · Download the source list (CSV)

Methods (summarized by Claude)

The map draws on 40 reports compiled from public web sources (Reddit, iNaturalist, the Harvard Gazette and Crimson, local news, and a few blogs), spanning 2012 to 2026. Each report was classified as follows:

  • Evidence type: a roost report means the source describes turkeys sleeping or perched overnight, or going up into a tree at dusk / seen up at dawn. A daytime flock location only records where a flock spends the day – weak evidence for a roost, though turkeys usually roost within a few hundred meters of their daytime range. The set is split evenly: 20 roost reports and 20 daytime locations.
  • Confidence: high means a firsthand account of explicit roosting at a specific spot; medium means explicit roosting but a vague location, or a secondhand account; low means the roosting is inferred, or the report is daytime only.
  • Location and uncertainty: coordinates are placed by hand from the description in each source – they are not GPS points. The circle around each marker reflects a judgment of how precisely the source pins the place, from ~30-60 m for a named tree or geotag up to ~1 km for descriptions like “along the Charles.”
  • Date: every record carries a year. The slider in the sidebar hides older reports, and the marker outlines distinguish reports from 2024 or later (solid), 2019-2023 (thin), and before 2019 (dashed).