On average, on the body of a turkey, 5000-6000 feathers grow. The feathers of these birds are quite large (especially the winged ones on the wings and the tail feathers in the tail), there is little down. The color of ordinary turkeys is dark.
The males are almost entirely black with a light greenish-bronze outflow, the flight feathers of the wings and the tail feathers of the tail have a transverse striation (ripples), the ends of the tail feathers are edged with black and light strips.
The color of the females is the same, but their plumage is lighter with a brownish tint. On the chest of turkeys hang a bundle of long hair-like feathers – “beard”, in females this ornament is found only in 10-20% of cases. In eye-shaped turkeys, “beards” never happen, but their coloring is not an example more colorful. Feathers on the neck and chest are dark, but each feather has a light brown strip on the end, which creates a scaly pattern.
In the caudal feathers, this pattern is retained only at the tip of the feather, and most of the feathers are painted with a shallow silvery ripple. Large wing feathers are painted black and white, and small, covering, in brown and metallic green. The spurs are complemented on the legs – long and thin in the eye buds, short and thick in the ordinary.
