by Chris O’Connor

Wild Turkeys, Our Native American Birds

The wild turkey, a large game bird native to North America, suffered severely depleted numbers due to habitat loss and unfettered hunting in America over a span of hundreds of years.

Thanks to decades of efforts by wildlife conservation groups, natural resources folks, and creative solutions to their management, wild turkeys have rebounded and now number over seven million.

A significant tool utilized to revive the wild turkey numbers, while they had all but disappeared, is the net cannon. Simply put, the net cannon is a wide net spread on the ground, chow is scattered, turkeys arrive to chow down. The cannon is triggered, and the net draws up around the birds. The birds are then shipped to locales where the birds are scarce or non-existent.

Turkeys possess excellent hearing and eyesight, are omnivores and opportunistic feeders, so on the face of it, they probably enjoy an easier life than many other wild animals.

They will consume whatever they can find, having adapted to follow a seasonal diet that follows the maturation of different plants and availability: whatever they can forage on—forest floor or farm field, including seeds, insects, berries, invertebrates such as snails, worms, and small amphibians and snakes. They are reported to have over six hundred food sources.

Male turkeys are called toms  or gobblers, for their famous vocalization that can be heard over a mile away. They’ll range over several square miles, sometimes joining a flock with hens, or traveling individually, though the species is considered a social one.

Mating season arrives early spring.  Toms will enter a clearing or fly up to a tree branch where they cackle away with their species-specific siren song: the famous gobble, which makes all their head parts—such as the wattles under the beak and the fleshy long protuberance hanging over the beak—wiggle as part of the display.

They are often depicted displaying their magnificent mating plumage with tails fanned out, feathers puffed up, and wings dropped and dragging the ground. They will strut around the hens so as to best display their red, green, copper, and gold iridescent feathers. As a member of a polygamous species, toms will court multiple hens.

Wild turkey hens are on their own after breeding and left to fashion their own nests, albeit minimalistic ones. Turkey hens’ nests aren’t built as many birds are, birds that typically have mates who help them search for materials and painstakingly construct them.

A turkey hen finds a suitable location at the base of a tree, within the cover of shrubby growth or tall grasses containing a shallow depression, with little more than existing leaf litter or other dry material, and begins to lay her eggs.

The hen may lay up to around fifteen or more eggs at the rate of one per day. She doesn’t begin incubation until the last one is laid. When the young hatch after approximately twenty-eight days, the young—or “poults” as her young are called—are “precocial,” meaning they are active and require little care.

The active chicks enjoy yolk reserves for a few days and scratch for insects with mother hen to fuel their rapid growth, which in part enables the poults to fly for short distances within a couple of weeks.

Hens will continue to brood the poults at night for some weeks, while they remain especially susceptible to hypothermia due to spring rains and chilly nights.

Eggs, hen, and poult predation are responsible for extreme losses to future generations of wild turkeys.  The mother hen has limited means to protect her live young, especially in the first two weeks of life.

During the day, the mother hen may sound an alarm call that signals poults to remain still. She will feign a broken wing injury and hobble away to lure a predator away from her very defenseless young. The poults have nothing more than their downy camouflage to remain indistinguishable from their surroundings.

Nest predators include the usual suspects, including skunks, opossums, snakes, foxes, and other egg-eating creatures. Domestic dogs can be a threat as well.

Mature turkeys and poults are hunted by coyotes, raptors, bobcats, cougars…and, of course, humans.  Some protection is provided tom turkeys with rather substantial spurs on their feet that can grow one to two inches long.  It is said that while the tom is more apt to run up to twenty-five miles per hour to escape attack, females are more likely to take to the wing.

Both genders share extremely acute hearing and eyesight, arguably their most effective survival assets.  They also roost in trees at night which offers some protection from terrestrial threats, though it is hard to imagine a twenty-five pound tom accomplishing such a feat.

Deep winter snowfall is a passive threat, a time when the birds may be unable to reach the ground to scavenge fallen nuts such as acorns and other foodstuffs crucial to restoration of fat and protein necessary to their survival until spring.

If there are no seeds, berries or other sustenance available, turkeys can survive a fast for approximately two weeks.

When spring arrives and life begins anew, one may witness tom turkeys with their red, white, and blue caruncle-covered featherless heads, long snood and wiggling red wattles in courtship regalia strutting around one or more female wild turkeys in a clearing.

Just as quickly as one sees them, blink and they disappear as if they were merely an apparition now camouflaged in the shade and light, drifting away in plain sight.