From KCRW, I'm Evan Klyman and you're listening to good food.

Turkey. It's ubiquitous once a year on many of our tables, but the bird whose preparation

we spend so much time worrying about and planning is a very different animal than the wild

turkey, a bird native to North America and in some minds synonymous with it.

Jesse Griffiths, an Austin-based chef, restaurateur, and author, is also a hunter.

He's written an intriguing journal, the Turkey book, about his experiences out in the field.

It's one he hopes will highlight conservation.

Hi, Jesse. Hi, it's so good to talk to you again.

Yeah, I know. It's been a very long time. You say in your journal that hunters relentlessly pursue these birds that have vacillating populations and infinite vulnerabilities while simultaneously dedicating massive resources to preserving their numbers.

Can you explain this kind of conundrum to a non-hunter?

Absolutely.

I mean, I think that you can go and look at the populations of the North American wild turkey basically since a European incursion and see how they have dipped and risen and in certain places, but almost have gone extinct in many, many states and regions

because of the conservation, mostly from hunting groups who have come in, established woodlands,

just dealt with basically a ground-up approach to making it a more hospitable environment

for these turkeys to thrive again, that we're seeing these populations come back. And granted,

yes, it's a lot of that is so that they can come back to huntable numbers, but, you know,

hunters have no desire to hunt something completely to extinction. It doesn't make any sense.

I think that the respect and just the general desire to know that every time that we go into

the woods and then our children, our grandchildren go into the woods, that there will still be

wild turkeys there really propels it more than the desire to come home with a turkey.

Can you describe the bird? Tell us a little bit about what they look like as you see them

in the woods and what their personalities are like? Yeah, I think, you know, the turkey kind of vacillates in people's opinions between

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