Auburn Turkey

About the Auburn Turkey

The Auburn (historically "Light Brown") is defined by a soft reddish-brown plumage in which the usual bronze pigment is replaced by red-brown, with flight feathers barred red-brown and white rather than the black-and-white of the Bronze. The colour arises from a recessive sex-linked brown gene, which once allowed Auburn toms crossed with Bronze hens to be colour-sexed at hatch. One of the rarest of all heritage turkeys and a Livestock Conservancy conservation-priority bird, recorded in Philadelphia market "turkey trots" in the late 1700s but never widely kept.