Where have they been all fall?

[Johnsfolly]

So I really like turkeys. I love the way the look, act smart and dumb, locally abundant or completely scarce. I love calling them and interacting with them whether that leads to a dead turkey or not (most of the time it doesn't 🙄). We get a few birds in the woodlot behind the house, typically a stray hen or two or maybe a gobbler sounding off in the woodlot. The big thrill last year were the big gobblers that showed up in our yard on Thanksgiving (of course could not hunt them then). Maryland has a three day winter turkey season. Of course this photo was taken the week prior to that season just cuz they Know 🤔!

Best that i could tell these were all hens. Several got within 20 yds of the house milling around in the open grass area. (our deer blind is just in the lower left hand corner of the photo) I counted 23 birds in all. Since we hadn't been actively hunting due to COVID in the house there was no corn out there, but they scratched up a lot of leaves while milling around back there. Very fun to see!

[fishinwrench]

It has been my experience that Turkeys live on one pair of ridges one year.....and a different pair of ridges the next.    

I've never seen them frequent the same woodlot two years in a row.   

[Dutch]

Across the road from our farm house, we have a creek bottom hay field.  Beyond that is the creek and a lot of timbered hills.  Almost every day 30 to 50 turkeys and 5 to 10 deer are showing up and feed in the field.  Calves are wintered there and the turkeys spend a lot of time turning over cow pies.  When spring comes they disappear and stay gone until the following late fall.  They do this every year.  I guess the turkeys fly over and the deer swim the creek and jump the fence.  During hunting season they never show up.

 

BTW great pic.

[Ryan Miloshewski]

Turkeys have definite ranges or home areas each part of the year. Glad they're back!

[BilletHead]

         Poor hatches and too many predators have them kind of thin in our parts but for the last month we had three tom's show up and are roosting on the 80 behind the house. Warm mornings they have been sounding off on the roost at daylight. Day before yesterday was really warm in the morning. All three got crazy. A sign of good things to come, I hope. This morning 'i bet the only concern was holding on tight to the limb they were roosting on. 

[Quillback]

Couple of areas on Table Rock and Beaver seem to always hold a few.  Other than that, doesn't seem to be many around in this part of the Ozarks.

[tjm]

Quillback, since I'm just a few miles from you, I can provide a little info on why you don't see more here. Now, I don't recall the years, but, 10-15 years ago we had cold wet rains during the brood time, not just once but several years in a row, resulting in zero recruitment. I went from having two flocks using my land (every year and year 'round, by the way) and having two or three hens nest every year to having none, and in the years since, the guys that hunt hard and know where every roost is told me that for a number of years they hadn't seen or heard a single bird in the whole area. Lost the usual two or three coveys  of bobwhites at the same time and I've not heard a quail since. As best I recall this affected most of Benton and McDonald counties.  MDC said they would come back eventually and the turkeys are, the past three years I've seen turkeys in the Big Sugar corridor from Pea Ridge  to near Pineville and the numbers are increasing with each year.  In another 20 years they will back in Bella Vista and Caverna. They just need to cross a couple of ridges.

The NWTF says "In general, the average life expectancy for hens is three years and four years for toms. Everyone likes to blame predators as the chief factor when discussing a wild turkey’s life expectancy, but, while predation is no doubt a factor,  ..."  So in theory  three consecutive bad years could wipe out the hen population. it did here, but it may have been a couple marginal years followed by three or four failing years.

[BilletHead]

2 minutes ago, tjm said:

Quillback, since I'm just a few miles from you, I can provide a little info on why you don't see more here. Now, I don't recall the years, but, 15-20 years ago we had cold wet rains during the brood time, not just once but several years in a row, resulting in zero recruitment. I went from having two flocks using my land (every year and year 'round, by the way) and having two or three hens nest every year to having none, and the guys that hunt hard and know where every roost is told me that for a number of years they hadn't seen or heard a single bird in the whole area. Lost the usual two or three coveys  of bobwhites at the same time and I've not heard a quail since. As best I recall this affected most of Benton and McDonald counties.  MDC said they would come back eventually and the turkeys are, the past three years I've seen turkeys in the Big Sugar corridor from Pea Ridge  to near Pineville and the numbers are increasing with each year.  In another 20 years they will back in Bella Vista and Caverna. They just need to cross a couple of ridges.

The NWTF says "In general, the average life expectancy for hens is three years and four years for toms. Everyone likes to blame predators as the chief factor when discussing a wild turkey’s life expectancy, but, while predation is no doubt a factor,  ..."  So in theory  three consecutive bad years could wipe out the hen population. it did here, but it may have been a couple marginal years followed by three or four failing years.

   @tjm

        There has been some discussion about the big poultry farms having an effect on the wild turkey. Have you heard anything about that?  That as the big turkey outfits got bigger coverage that is when there was a decline in the population. Something was being spread in the manure from farms and spread in fields and pastures. Is there anything to this? I'm not looking for conspiracy theories just scientific facts. 

[tjm]

5 minutes ago, BilletHead said:

   @tjm

        There has been some discussion about the big poultry farms having an effect on the wild turkey. Have you heard anything about that?  That as the big turkey outfits got bigger coverage that is when there was a decline in the population. Something was being spread in the manure from farms and spread in fields and pastures. Is there anything to this? I'm not looking for conspiracy theories just scientific facts. 

I haven't heard that. But, I know that, almost all the local poultry farms are gone, probably all out five or ten years ago,  and that when they were flourishing in the '80s through the early 2000s is when we had the densest population of both wild Turkeys and Bald Eagles. I know a biologist that specializes in game birds and I'll ask about a poultry connection. Locally the poultry was scattered throughout the area on individual farms and sometime again vaguely 10-20 years ago handling of dead birds and field spreading of litter was restricted to the point that most guys retired rather than invest in the new methods. This moved most/all production to large corporate  farms out on the prairies near OK or up toward the I44, so in this immediate area I don't see any connection.

[tjm]

I just thought of an anecdote having to do with poultry and wild turkeys,   back in the mid-late '60s there were lots of thousands of domestic turkeys being grown out side on "ranges", ~3 acre patches wire fenced ~8' as i remember, this was about the same period that we first started seeing wild turkeys show up locally and near one of those range operations some of the wild turkeys in a couple of flocks were white and the next year there several pied turkeys in those flocks. that particular range operation dissolved after about two years due to divorce and the whole outside ranging idea was scrapped for inside ranging not long after that; but the wild turkeys in that location were still often pied ~40 years later, with some being mostly white. I've never known for sure if the white was from the domestic stock or if it and the pied factor are natural in the wild stock. I'll be watching as that area repopulates to see if the pied strain comes back too.