Colored Turkeys the Hit of Connecticut Turkey Farm
The turkeys are brought out each holiday season, starting Nov. 1.
— -- Visitors to a Connecticut turkey farm who see turkeys in neon colors like pink, yellow and orange wandering the farm are not seeing things; the colored turkeys are a feature of the farm, and they are proud of it.
“They become showoffs out there,” farm owner Bill Gozzi told ABC News of the colored turkeys. “They like the attention and the turkeys strut around and put on a display.”
“It’s amazing how they like that,” he said.
Gozzi is the third-generation owner of Gozzi’s Turkey Farm in Guilford, Connecticut. He says it was his grandmother who began the tradition of displaying the colored turkeys during the holiday season nearly 40 years ago.
“My grandmother started that soon after they opened the farm as something for the local kids and it just stuck,” said Gozzi, 54. “Now there are thousands of kids, bus loads, who come out to see the turkeys.”
The colored turkeys are on display for visitors to the farm each year from Nov. 1 through Christmas Day. Gozzi says the first thing visitors ask when they see the turkey is how they got that way, but no member of Gozzi’s family has ever answered that question.
“That’s a family secret,” he said. “We just leave it for the kids’ imagination.”
“Kids always ask is if it is in the eggs or the food,” Gozzi said. “That’s the beauty of it. Everyone has their own ideas.”
The farm is a year-round turkey farm, with their high season coming from Thanksgiving to Christmas. Gozzi says the farm delivers around 15,000 turkeys each year.
That, he says, is why the colored turkeys are so “lucky.”
“They’re the only ones that are walking around here on Thanksgiving morning,” Gozzi said. “They’re the lucky ones.”
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