Blue Wattle: Spanish Conquistadors

Who Started Thanksgiving Dept: How much time do you have? The short answer is we don t know definitively. The long answer is they re named for Turkey, the country. Spanish conquistadors took them back to Europe s dining rooms in the late 15th century. But even before then, a smaller African version, the guinea fowl Numida meleagris , was already on British menus. Often known as turkey fowl or turkey coq, they were imported from Turkish traders. Thus, when Europeans encountered the bird in the New World, the word turkey was a lot easier to remember and to pronounce than the Aztec word, huexoloti, according to Globe and Mail. Who started Thanksgiving and why are they called turkeys? However, there are other intriguing explanations for the name s genesis. One is that it arose because the bird s sometimes blue wattle is the colour of turquoise or Turkey stone . Another, even more exotic theory is that Luis de Torres, the Jewish convert to Catholicism who was Christopher Columbus s interpreter in 1492, dubbed the bird tukki Hebrew for parrot. And yet another is that Columbus himself called it tuka, the Tamil word for peacock. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.