Turkey Coloring Pages

Most turkey sheets printed in November are a cartoon bird with a hand-shaped tail. These free printable turkey coloring pages are drawn from the actual bird instead: the barred feathers, the bare blue head, the wattle, the fan a tom raises when another tom is watching. They still print for the last week of November, but they also work in a topic on farm birds or on wild animals in winter, which the cartoon version never does.

The set runs from the nest outwards. A hen sits on a clutch of speckled eggs in the ferns, a poult pushes out of its shell, a brood follows its mother through the grass with one riding on her back. Then the yard: turkeys at a spilled feed sack, at a water trough, sharing a trough with two goats, perched on the arm of a patched scarecrow. And then the wild birds: a flock feeding in snow with their tracks printed across the drifts, five roosting along a bare branch at sunset, one landing heavily on an oak.

Printing for a class the week before Thanksgiving

Print a week ahead, not the night before. Count one per child plus spares, and take three or four different drawings rather than thirty copies of one. Mix the bands on purpose: a pile of fast sheets for the youngest, a few dense ones for the children who finish early and ask for another.

Quick to color above the grid holds that end of the range and starts with the quickest.

• A turkey head and neck close up
• Turkeys roosting at sunset
• A flock crossing a snowy field

The patterned turkey is the one to hand a whole table. Each tail feather carries a different pattern, so thirty copies come back thirty different pages, and nobody compares.

Colors that make a turkey look right

• The tail is the page. Alternate the colors in a fixed order and repeat it round the fan. Brown, mustard, deep red, and a darker brown for the bars.
• Bars across the feathers, not along them. A turkey's feathers are banded crosswise. One darker line across each feather is enough.
• The head is blue-gray, the wattle red. Almost no other color on the bird, so it carries the whole page.
• Bronze body feathers: brown with a warm edge. Go over the tips with an orange pencil and it reads as the sheen.
• Snow stays white. Color the sky pale gray-blue and leave the drifts as bare paper, with a faint blue only in the hollows.

Place cards, and a table a child has made

Thanksgiving is the one meal of the year where children are given a job, and a printer solves it.

Print the single tail feather at half size, one per guest. Each child colors one, writes a name along the quill in pencil first and pen after, and folds a narrow strip at the bottom so it stands up. A table of hand-colored place cards costs nothing and gets talked about more than the bought ones.

The patterned turkey works differently: hand out the same sheet to everyone at the table, adults included, before the food comes out. Thirty copies come back thirty different birds because every tail feather carries its own pattern, and comparing them fills the twenty minutes that are otherwise the worst part of the day.

A third idea, for a class rather than a family. Cut the fanned tails off a dozen colored sheets, write one thing each child is glad about on each feather, and overlap them into a single fan on the wall. It is the usual thankful-tree exercise with better drawing and less glue.

Anything that is going to be handled or stood up wants 160 gsm card rather than copy paper. The printing guide covers the weights.

For a farm or wildlife topic

A couple of sheets earn their place in a lesson rather than a party. One is the tracks: two three-toed prints in soft mud beside a dropped feather, which is how you actually know a turkey has been there. The other is the single tail feather with an acorn, drawn large enough to show the barring, and about as close as a page gets to a field guide.

The farmyard sheets fill out a broader topic, and the farm coloring pages carry the rest of the animals if you want a whole set.

The head that changes color

The strangest thing about a turkey is on its head, and it is worth knowing before coloring it.

The bare skin on a tom's head and neck changes color with his mood, shifting between pale blue, white and bright red within seconds. Red means excitement or aggression; white and blue mean calm. So there is no single correct color for that head, and a child who makes it red has drawn an agitated bird.

The parts have names. The fleshy flap over the beak is the snood, and it lengthens when the bird displays. The wattle hangs under the chin. The bumps on the neck are caruncles. The tuft hanging from the chest, which looks like a mistake, is the beard, and it is made of modified feathers.

The body feathers are not brown. They are iridescent, throwing bronze, copper and green in sunlight, which is why a wild turkey in a field looks far better than it does in a drawing. Color the body a warm brown and run an orange or green pencil lightly over the tips and it reads immediately.

Wild turkeys can fly, fast and low, and roost in trees at night. The farmyard birds on these pages mostly cannot.

The slow ones, for a quiet evening

Lots of detail covers the other end, and the first sheet it shows is the heaviest in the set.

• A patterned turkey with a fanned tail
• Two toms displaying at each other
• A poult hatching in the nest

The head study is the one to keep for an evening: every wattle and every scaled feather drawn separately, and a full page of warm browns to work through. Sharp colored pencils do better than markers here. For more birds at the same weight, the duck coloring pages are the nearest.

Each sheet is a free A4 PDF at 300 dpi, with no sign-up. Print at 100 % scale on A4, or "fit to page" on US Letter so the edges are not clipped; the printing guide has the settings. Press Add to pack under each drawing to print several as one file, and the fall coloring pages go in the same pack if you want leaves as well as birds.