Wild Turkey Cuts Power to Thousands of Homes on Christmas Eve

A wild turkey crashed into a power line in southern Sacramento, California, on Christmas Eve leaving more than 4,000 properties without power, though this has since been restored.

The Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) said 4,248 of its customers lost power at around 12:15 p.m. PST on Sunday following the bird strike, with those impacted in the Little Pocket and Greenhaven neighborhoods.

Workers were swiftly sent out to fix the damage and no power outages were continuing as of 0:26 a.m. PST, according to the SMUD website.

"There was a turkey in the line that crews are working to repair quickly and safely," a SMUD spokesperson told The Sacramento Bee newspaper following the outage.

The company said power to the impacted areas would be rerouted through another circuit and forecast it would be restored by 1:20 p.m. Over 300 people contacted the SMUD to report they had lost power, according to the outage page of the company's website.

The Sacramento Bee reports the turkey involved was killed in the collision. Newsweek has contacted the SMUD for comment by telephone.

Power outages were reported on X, formerly Twitter, by the South Land Park Neigborhood Association, a non-profit which says it "exists to protect, promote, and enhance our neighborhood."

The group posted: "The power is out in parts of South Land Park. It's been off and on and off again. Fingers crossed this doesn't ruin holiday meals and festivities!"

While wild turkeys can be found across the continental United States, a 2022 paper co-authored by Michael Chamberlain, a professor of wildlife ecology at the University of Georgia, found the biggest concentrations were in California, Texas, Alabama, Wisconsin and Kentucky.

Turkeys were driven to extinction in many states by overhunting and deforestation but their numbers have since recovered, with Chamberlain commenting: "The restoration of wild turkeys is one of the greatest North American conservation stories."

Earlier this month, Hong Kong banned the import of poultry, including turkeys, and their eggs from parts of five American states following an outbreak of the H5N1 virus, better known as bird flu.

The order was given on December 11 by the Chinese city's Centre for Food Safety. The impacted areas are Stanislaus County and San Benito County in California, Johnson County in Arkansas, Darke County in Ohio, Bent County in Colorado and Barron County in Wisconsin.

Ahead of Thanksgiving, a post from animal rights group PETA, urging people not to eat turkeys, was widely shared on X where it was mocked by some social media users. The post contained an illustration of a family of turkeys sitting down for dinner to gorge on a human, with a caption reading: "We're lucky turkeys would never do this to us—you don't have to do it them, either."

However another X user noted turkeys are meat eaters, with a second commenting: "The only reason they don't eat us is because we're top tier predators. They sure as heck would eat us if they could."

In 2022 researchers in Pennsylvania caught a wild turkey which they assessed to be at least 12 years old, with one of those involved commenting: "To tell you the truth, this hen should not be alive."