Birdsong is a welcome sign of spring, but robins and cardinals aren't the one birds boasting during breeding season. In many parts of North America, you might be prone to encounter male wild turkeys, hyped up like beach balls and strutting aggressively through forests and parks with their tails outstretched Stop traffic in your street.
When European settlers arrived, wild turkeys were abundant throughout North America. But people killed them indiscriminately all year long – sometimes for his or her meat and feathers, but settlers also took turkey eggs from nests and poisoned adult turkeys to stop them from damaging crops. Thanks to this unregulated killing and habitat loss, wild turkeys had disappeared from much of their historic range by 1900.
Turkey's population step by step recovered throughout the twentieth century, helped by regulation, conservation funding, etc government restoration programs. By the early 2000s they may very well be present in Mexico, Canada and each US state except Alaska.
However, the trend now appears to be reversing in some areas. In a 2021 study, eight of 30 states surveyed reported that turkey populations declined from 2014 to 2019with among the largest declines in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana and Oklahoma.
Turkey's numbers rose in 14 states, mostly within the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. But even in a lot of these states, populations had declined from historic highs within the early 2000s. Another 2023 study reported that turkey populations had increased within the eastern half of the United States decline by around 9% annuallybased on data from the last 50 years.
We are wildlife Ecologists We are working to know why turkey populations are declining in parts of their range. This is a classic challenge in ecology: Many aspects may very well be at play, and it takes careful evaluation to disentangle them and determine whether each trend is a cause or a symptom — or simply irrelevant.
We created this Wild Turkey Science Podcast to make peer-reviewed science available to the general public and to offer Turkish researchers and biologists with a platform to debate their work. So far, we’ve reviewed quite a few studies and interviewed scientists from greater than a dozen countries. Here are some hypotheses which have emerged:
Less open spaces
While turkeys may appear at home in urban areasis their habitat Open forest – Areas with sparse tree cover, allowing near full sunlight to achieve herbaceous plants at ground level. The most Highlands or elevated areasThe eastern United States historically had all these drought-adapted forest, savanna, and grassland complexes.
In 1792 Naturalist William Bartram described the eastern United States as “Grande Savane,” or large savannah, a landscape with many wild turkeys. While traveling through Florida, Bartram wrote:
“I was awakened early in the morning by the jubilant conversation of wild turkey roosters saluting each other from the sunlit tops of the tall cypress and magnolia trees. They start early in the morning and last until sunrise. The high forests echo with the noise of these social sentinels, the slogan being picked up and repeated from one to another for hundreds of miles around, so that the whole country is drowned in a general cry for an hour or more.”
Today, There may be very little forest or savannah left In the United States, most of it has been cleared for construction, agriculture, or livestock grazing. The open spaces which are often left are not suitable for wild turkeys: They require a well-developed vegetation layer at ground level consisting primarily of wildflowers, native grasses, and young shrubs and trees Cover for nesting and raising their young.
Very few of the remaining areas suitable for wild turkeys are managed with regular, low-intensity prescribed fire. that creates and maintains a mosaic of open forest and grassland by continually reducing the expansion of trees, shrubs and vines. Suppressing fires in these eastern US forests allows them to vary from open forest dominated by fire-adapted grasses and wildflowers to closed forests with dense canopiesThis creates shady, moist conditions with minimal vegetation near the bottom.
Turkeys can survive in these denser, shaded forests, but they don’t reproduce as successfully and fewer of their young survive. The lack of ground vegetation makes it difficult for chickens to cover their nests and limits the food supply of young turkey poults.
This isn't just an issue for wild turkeys. Over the last 50 years, the populations of bird species living there have increased open forests and meadows have decreased by greater than 50%. Grasslands and savannahs also support a whole bunch of other wildlife species, a lot of that are in decline.
The role of food, predators and hunting
Scientists have proposed other explanations for the turkey decline, but a lot of these hypotheses are at the least partly attributable to habitat problems.
For example, the blame is commonly placed on several people quite a few predators that eat turkey eggs, like raccoons and opossums. But these predators are likely more common partly due to changes in turkey habitat.
For example, a 2024 study found that numerous mammals eating turkey eggs were observed 70% of the time when prescribed burning was not used, but lower than 10% of the time in open forests where planned burns were carried out every two years. This suggests that prescribed fire throughout the wild turkey's range creates an environment more favorable to turkeys than to their predators.
Some observers have suggested that there could also be so many turkeys that the landscape can now not support its current population, so that they are actually declining to more sustainable levels. If turkey habitat remained stable, we might expect their numbers to rise and fall naturally, but their average abundance would remain the identical over time. Instead, turkey numbers seem like slowly but steadily declining in lots of areas – perhaps indicating that habitat availability is declining together with turkey populations.
What in regards to the food supply? Young turkeys feed on insects, so the decline in insects could explain some observed changes in turkey populations. According to 1 calculation, these are land-dwelling bird species that depend on insects for food decreased by 2.9 billion people over the past 50 years, while species that should not have increased by 26.2 million individuals.
Insect losses could explain why fewer turkeys reach maturity, but insects depend on plants, so this shift can be likely related to habitat changes. And where land is managed to advertise native flowers and grasses, there are also plentiful pollinators, ants, grasshoppers and spiders that turkeys love.
Finally, some observers have suggested that the timing of hunting could affect turkey reproduction. However a current study in Tennessee found that this was not the case. Another recent study showed that hunters were harvesting within the Southeast in regards to the same proportion of male turkeys as turkey populations grew rapidly. If current turkey harvest rates are usually not sustainable, the reason is probably going that wild turkey productivity has declined for other reasons, akin to habitat.
Make room for turkeys
Landowners can assist by maintaining native grasses and wildflowers on their property, which offer a breeding ground for turkeys. We have produced podcast episodes that debate What plants are invaluable to turkeys and other wildlife?and the best way to do it promote and maintain plants that are turkey friendly.
People who don't own land can support state and native wildlife restoration effortsdonate to local wildlife conservation groups and buy hunting licenses that Help fund wildlife management programs. Given the suitable conditions, this iconic North American species could thrive again.
image credit : theconversation.com