Wolfson College has been a bastion of academia at West Berkeley University in Pennsylvania since its founding in 1831, according to the school’s website. The campus is bordered by farmland, and its observatory features a telescope capable of viewing a 75-mile-wide telescope.
But this fall, Wolfson is the proud home of an entirely different species of student: turkeys.
When the seventh-grade students at the university’s Wolfson Academy began an ambitious fundraising effort to put an education center on campus this fall, they turned to a handful of wild turkeys to help them reach their goal. Their particular roster of turkeys included a non-canned, roasted variety and another that had been branded for gathering the nuts of local flower gardens.
The dedicated turkeys quickly multiplied into a resident flock numbering about 500, by campus estimates.
“This is not the first time we’ve had turkeys on campus,” said EJ Harrison, an admissions counselor at Wolfson. “We had one back in the 1920s. So we kind of see them coming back year after year.”