During the next 90 minutes, as the sun rises and more birds awaken to fill the morning with song, I make 10 more stops along a 12-mile route to tally the number of turkeys and the number of gobbles I can detect. I hear a total of nine turkeys at five stops in varying habitat – thick forest, low-density
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| Wild turkeys in my yard (Michael Salerno) |
Wild turkey breeding has apparently been highly successful in recent years, as turkey numbers have been booming in southern New England following successful reintroduction efforts in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. Today, the birds have adapted so well to wooded neighborhoods that they have become a nuisance in many areas, creating innumerable conflicts with people, and making some biologists wonder if the reintroductions were too successful.
“They’re social animals and have a social organization to their flocks,” said Dave Scarpitti, a wildlife biologist with the Massachusetts Division of Fish and Wildlife. “When they become suburban, they lose their fear of humans and start to assimilate humans into their social hierarchy and their social pecking order. They have such a close association with humans that they don’t see them as a threat.”
In suburban areas, the result is sometimes aggressive encounters, almost always initiated by younger male turkeys as they are coming of age and vying for position within their flock. Turkeys are regularly reported chasing children waiting for their school bus and chasing adults as they walk neighborhood streets. In Rhode Island, the mayor of one town assigned a team of animal control officers to capture three turkeys that were often seen stopping traffic at a busy intersection. They caught two of them quickly, but the last one eluded them for months, becoming a running joke in the local media.
“Almost always it’s a function of someone in the neighborhood who is deliberately feeding them,” Scarpitti said. “They think they’re helping the birds and may not understand the implications of what they’re doing and how it’s affecting other folks in their neighborhood.”
The suburban turkey problem in southern New England does not appear to be going away anytime soon, yet turkey numbers in rural forested areas don’t approach their historic abundance levels or the densities they have achieved in suburbia.
Wild turkeys were abundant in the region when Europeans colonized the area, but their numbers declined as forests were cleared for agriculture. Unregulated hunting also took its toll. The last native wild turkey in Connecticut was shot in 1813, and the last in Massachusetts was harvested in 1850. A few lasted in Rhode Island into the 1920s. By the 1940s and 50s, people in all three states sought to bring back the region’s largest gamebird.
For several decades thereafter, hundreds of pen-raised wild turkeys were released in numerous locations, but none of them survived long. “They had the genetics of wild turkeys, but they didn’t have the link that hens have with their poults,” said Mike Gregonis, a wildlife biologist with the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. “The hens never could teach the poults how to survive in the wild.”
“When you raise turkeys on a farm, they have the habits of a domestic animal,” added Jenny Kilburn, the state gamebird biologist in Rhode Island. “They had very high mortality when they were released.”
When state wildlife officials began trapping turkeys from the wild in states with a surplus of birds and relocating them to targeted areas in southern New England, their numbers quickly grew. In Connecticut, 22 wild turkeys captured in western New York in 1975 were released in the northwest corner of the state, and three years later there were enough there to begin an in-state trap-and-transfer program to other parts of the Nutmeg State. A similar effort began in Rhode Island in 1980, with 29 turkeys from Vermont released in the town of Exeter, followed shortly by a trap-and-transfer to other communities. And in Massachusetts, where 37 wild turkeys from western New York were introduced to Berkshire County in 1972 and 73, they expanded so fast that a limited hunt was allowed by 1980.
“They naturally expanded on their own, and we did 50 trap-and-transfer operations from the mid-70s to the mid-90s into various places across the state, with the last occurring into Cape Cod,” said Scarpitti. “And now they’re everywhere except Nantucket.”
Although it isn’t illegal to feed wild turkeys in Massachusetts, Scarpitti would prefer that the practice would stop. He estimates that the state is home to about 35,000 turkeys, which averages out to about 100 in each of the state’s 351 communities. “When you think of it that way, it doesn’t sound like a lot,” he said. “But I know some towns that have way more than that. The actual number isn’t terribly important; it’s more about what way is it going.” And the way it’s going isn’t good.
Scarpitti and the other state biologists get calls regularly from residents complaining about aggressive turkeys. Managing problem turkeys has become an ongoing issue for them. “They’ve reached their social carrying capacity,” Scarpitti said. “People aren’t as willing to tolerate them anymore.”
Anecdotal reports suggest that similar issues are beginning to occur in northern New England, too. Scarpitti said that wild turkeys, originally a southern species, were scarce in northern Vermont and New Hampshire and central Maine during colonization, but now they are increasingly common as human development has made the region more hospitable to the birds.
The bulk of the Massachusetts turkey population used to be in the forested western part of the state, but no longer. Now they are primarily in the most populated areas, east of the Route 495 corridor. While Berkshire County had excellent habitat 45 years ago when turkeys were released there – a mix of young forests and farmland – today many of the farms have been abandoned and much of the forest has matured beyond what is ideal for turkey production.
“Unquestionably the habitat has changed over that time. It’s trending to a state that’s less productive than it once was,” Scarpitti said. “We’re trying to figure out ways to get good oak regeneration in our forests. Oaks are ubiquitous, but trying to get new oak to grow is a little tricky. Sixty percent of the state is forested, and a great amount of the land is preserved, but preservation is only half of it. Managing forests to create diversity on the landscape is the challenge.”
Turkey numbers in the three southern New England states reached their peak sometime in the mid-2000s, but the Connecticut and Rhode Island populations have experienced a slight decline since then.
“Some say the turkeys overshot their carrying capacity for the amount of resources the landscape can handle, and I think there’s some merit to that,” Gregonis said. “But there’s other things going on, too.”
Predator numbers in Connecticut and Rhode Island have been on the rise, for instance. Poults are particularly susceptible to aerial predators like hawks, as well as fishers, foxes and other mammals. As in Massachusetts, maturing of forest habitat is also a concern. And disease, especially avian pox, is a limiting factor in some areas. The biggest cause for the decline, though, has been rainy spring weather during two crucial periods.
“If we get three days of rain when most turkeys are on their nest, then the turkeys don’t get a chance to dry off their feathers, they emit more of an odor, and predators can key in on their nest,” ‘Gregonis said. “And if we get that same weather when the poults hatch out, their fine downy feathers will get wet and they’ll lose their insulation properties and the birds can succumb to exposure.”
The next likely threat to turkey populations in southern New England will probably come from the changing climate, which could bring more extreme weather events in spring and a change in the composition of tree species that could force turkeys to switch their diet, though warming winters will also improve their chances of survival during that crucial period.
Biologists in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island conduct annual brood surveys to monitor their turkey populations, and some occasionally take other steps as well, like the gobbler survey in which I participated. But the primary turkey management method they employ is the collection of data from turkey hunters. All three states have a spring hunt with a combined harvest of about 4,200 birds each year and a less popular fall hunt when another 400 are shot. Little of that harvest occurs where turkey populations are most dense – the suburbs – since hunting is not allowed in most residential areas, so the rural-living turkeys face the brunt of the hunting pressure.
This year’s harvest numbers are expected to be among the highest in recent years, as the COVID19 pandemic provided many hunters with more free time and a flexible schedule in the spring that allowed them to spend more time hunting.
Yet despite the threats from predators, disease, degraded habitat, rainy weather, climate change and hunters, turkeys are still thriving.
“I remember a winter not long ago that had the deadly combination of bitter cold and lots of fluffy snow that makes it difficult for turkeys to move through it efficiently. It was as adverse as it gets in southern New England, when we should have seen turkeys falling from the trees dead, and we didn’t. They’re resilient,” said Scarpitti. “And even if they did, they’re still able to bounce back to their pre-winter populations. Turkeys are equipped to suffer through the bad years and rebound on those good years.”
Rebound they have.
As I write this in early May, three male turkeys are strutting their stuff in my forested backyard in rural Rhode Island, their featherless heads displaying a red, white and blue pattern, tails raised and fanned out, and wings stiff and dragging on the ground. Four females pecking at the grass – and one taking a dirt bath – appear unimpressed. Until, that is, one female sits prone in my garden and the largest male approaches, recognizing that she is receptive to mating. So he stands on her back, carefully maintaining his balance until she raises her tail, and they touch cloacae to complete the mating ritual.
They probably didn’t notice my wife and I watching, nor did they appear to care.
“Their bold behaviors seem to escalate during the breeding season when males get a little loopy and don’t associate people as something to fear,” said Kilburn. “I’ve had turkeys come right up to me, gobbling in full strut, and thinking that I’m another turkey. They’re out to find a hen, and they’ll respond to any noise they think is a hen. Including us.”
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