Wild turkeys are everywhere...or are they?

The turkeys we see in the suburbs are a somewhat frustrating success

NOTE: Any readers in Houston?! I’ll be at the Houston Museum of Natural Science on February 20 to talk about PESTS! I’m super excited and I hope to see you all there!

Today I’ve got another entry in cut scenes, aka some cool material that I reported for a feature and got left on the cutting room floor because it didn’t quite serve the story. Today’s is from a feature that’s in the works at Sierra on synanthropes—animals that thrive around people—which will appear in the spring issue. I’m so happy they let me use the material here!

The first time, or maybe second, that hen 893 passed a small hump of brush in a thicket inside a Nature Conservancy area on the eastern shore of Maryland, she paused for about an hour. When she got up again, a beige egg lay on top of the small mound, partially shielded by growing greenbrier. Over the next 12 days, the turkey passed the site again and again, each day or so dropping off another egg. Finally, with a final clutch of nine, she settled in to incubate her brood.

Hen 893 wasn’t truly in the wilderness. The Nature Conservancy area is an easy drive from the city of Salisbury, MD. Paved roads enter it and dead end, giving way to  dirt roads (some marked with the tracks of displaying turkeys). It’s the exurbs, where people go to get a house that’s closer to nature, but still not a terrible drive to a Starbucks.

But a natural life is not an easy one.

The dragging marks here were the draped wings of a displaying male turkey, strutting his stuff to impress the ladies. Photo by me.

The 27 brooding days are the most vulnerable time for a hen. It’s worse for her future poults. Around 75 percent of broods never hatch in the first place, says Bob Long, the wild turkey and upland game bird project leader for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. Eggs after all are popular food for  many species—snakes, possums, raccoons, skunks, foxes. A hen will defend her nest, but when a predator gets too close, she’ll fly the coop, and her eggs will pay the price.

Once the poults hatch, the hen abandons the nest, taking the brood to more open habitat where there is plenty of food. But danger isn’t past. Her tiny, flightless young are basically “walking turkey nuggets,” says Maddy Ondo, a natural resources technician with the Western Maryland Resource Conservation and Development Council and the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. For the two weeks until they are big enough to roost in a tree, they are in constant danger from all of the above predators, with the addition of owls, hawks, and more.

If 75 percent of eggs never hatch, another 75 percent of poults never make it through the first year, Long explains. Any given turkey egg has only about a 6 percent chance of becoming an adult turkey at all.

And that’s before thinking about the turkey population declines that Long has been seeing across the state. Maryland reported its highest turkey harvest for hunters in 2023, but the turkey breast buffet conceals a downward trend in wild turkey numbers—about seven percent year over year, Long says.

The remains of 893’s nest. The neatly halved shells are signs of a successful hatch. Two unhatched eggs remain.

This might come as a surprise to anyone who has confronted an aggressive wild turkey in Massachusetts, Washington DC, California, or basically anywhere else where it seems wild turkeys are doing a bit too well. Wild turkey populations have endured some truly extreme highs and lows over the past century, says David Scarpitti, a wildlife biologist in the Massachusetts division of Fisheries and Wildlife. When white colonizers arrived in the northeast, they never turned down a turkey sandwich. Turkeys vanished from Massachusetts by 1850, and were gone from almost all their natural range by the end of World War II.

Then, of course, people wanted them back. Over the past 120 years, Scarpitti says, there have been various attempts to reintroduce turkeys. “They were all kind of fatally flawed,” he says. “Most of them, if not all of them, relied on just growing turkeys in captivity and then releasing them out into the wild.” But birds raised on farms are just too naïve. They don’t fear predators, and can’t forage efficiently. Conservationists needed turkeys raised in the wild to make it there.

One does not simply catch a wild turkey. The few remaining populations were very wild indeed. They startled easily, flew away often, and were leery of traps. The most effective trapping method involved getting turkeys used to coming to one spot for food, and then shooting out a rocket-powered net over the birds, hopefully before they got airborne. The resulting catch could then be transplanted to strut elsewhere. The agencies didn’t just focus on places where turkeys had once been, but expanded to areas where they had never lived, including places in Canada and the western United States. It wasn’t about the birds themselves, really. “Agencies were interested in having a sustainable species that's a game species because it would generate revenue,” says Michael Chamberlain, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Georgia in Athens.

Wild birds worked, and turkey recovery is a huge conservation success story. They settled in well along edge woodland and in secondary growth forests that characterized so much of the United States’s East Coast and Midwest. By the 1980s and 90s, agencies expanded hunting access, often in places that have become exurbs, where natural areas are relatively close to populated ones.

And then, Chamberlain began to suspect that turkey numbers were going down. It’s not an easy suspicion to confirm, he explains, because turkeys don’t exactly go about answering census surveys. For a 2022 paper, Chamberlain ended up asking state wildlife biologists across the Midwest and eastern US to send estimates of their turkey populations , as well as reporting their harvest numbers. A few states, such as Maryland, Massachusetts and Rhode Island reported increases. But others, such as Louisiana, Arkansas, and Georgia, reported major drops. The final estimate was for somewhere between 4.9 and 5 million turkeys across the continental United States in 2019—an 18 to 20 percent decrease since 2014.

There may be no single reason for the decline. For example, it’s possible that the high numbers of the 1980s and 1990s could have been a blip, Chamberlain explains. “When you restore populations, they go through this exponential growth, where the population is literally skyrocketing,” he says, before flattening to where the population should be to meet the carrying capacity of their ecosystem. But if the current turkey numbers are the right ones, they are much lower than wildlife biologists predicted. 

Habitat destruction could play a role. Turkeys have home ranges of thousands of acres, and prefer a nice mix of forest and open areas. But in natural areas, Chamberlain notes, more and more forest is getting converted to exurbs—combinations of agricultural land, subdivisions, and state-owned lots that may manage the habitat differently. “The remaining habitat that's there is of poorer quality than it was 20 years ago, 30 years ago,” he says. The habitat is also fragmented by roads, powerlines and more. “That's not positive for turkeys,” Chamberlain says. “It's actually positive for things that kill and eat turkeys.”

Ever-present climate change could also play a role. In a 2023 study, Chamberlain and his colleagues noted that while the spring green-up (and its attendant insects) is happening earlier, turkeys aren’t shifting their nesting times, which are triggered by day length, not temperature. If there’s a big enough mismatch, it could be hard for poults to find enough to eat, though Chamberlain notes there’s really not enough data to tell if it’s having an impact yet.

Human hunting doesn’t help, though that’s why the birds were brought back in the first place. “As populations were expanding and they were really doing well, agencies were liberalizing hunting seasons, allowing longer seasons, higher bag limits…” Chamberlain says. Those bag limits “were not based on the biology of the bird, they were based on political desire and social pressures.” The regulations are challenging to change, he notes, no hunter likes a lower bag limit. The state doesn’t either; fewer hunters means less money.

Ondo scans for 893s radio transmitter. Photo by me.

Any attempt to change regulations, however, requires more data, which is why scientists need more hens like 893. Long and Ondo first encountered her in March of 2023, when they captured her and several of her compatriots with rocket nets. When 893 came out of the net Long and his team popped a sock over her head. Like most birds, a lack of vision means lack of motion, and while 893 was good and still, two scientists quickly took blood samples, and fitted her with a small backpack. The backpack contained an accelerometer and radio transmitter. Once they hen was released, she preened her feathers over it, resulting, Long says, in a little hump on her back—the only sign she’s been tampered with.

That’s why Long and Ondo know at the beginning of May that 893 was brooding. By the time Long and Ondo work their way through the yards of thorny greenbriers to the nest, hen 893 is long gone. The hummock contains a depression, seven hatched shells, and two whole eggs. Long can’t say if they would have hatched given more time. A hen with a new brood, he says, is constantly weighing the risks and benefits of staying put to hatch more eggs, or move off to feed the new chicks.

In this case, hen 893 proved just how dangerous motherhood can be. The day after Long and Ondo visit the nest, she and her brood were killed by a fox, and her transmitter went silent. 

Hen 893 was part of a multistate project which includes Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, with New Jersey set to join. The goal, Long says, is to compare different habitats and predator communities, to try and find out why turkeys are suffering in some areas, but thriving in others. People in the exurbs, it turns out, may want to live close to nature. But developing that land, and pushing some predators out, may have left the nature they want to see in a tight spot.  

In contrast, of course, there are turkeys in the suburbs. There, there are no predators, and humans often stop, take pictures, or even just up and run away . First, we killed off all the turkeys, and we wondered what the heck happened. Now, we’ve reintroduced them…and still don’t know what the heck is going on.

In both cases, where turkeys are declining, and where turkeys are increasing (more on that in Sierra and in my book!) we are acting out of ignorance. We don’t know what turkeys really need to thrive in large numbers, any more than we know how to protect ourselves from a turkey attack. We know the wildlife we want to see. But all we know is where we want to see it, and where we definitely don’t.

Where have you been?

The things about putting out a newsletter once every two weeks is that it doesn’t become horrid for my schedule, but it also means that wow the links pile up because there’s great stuff to read in the world.

• Or listen to! Like I’m kind of obsessed with this podcast about, er, fish. And fishing. Just, all the fish.

• For those of you who love a cruise…maybe keep in mind that they are really, really bad for the climate. Worse than flights. Don’t let the green washing fool you.

• This photographer taught pet rats to press a lever…to take SELFIES and the results are adorable beyond all belief.

• This piece is really moving, the voice of a parent of a child with special needs. "You might once have rolled your eyes at such politically correct, “person-first” jargon, but now that it labels your person, you will not."

• A deep study of people who have dieted over and over reveals the mental and physical harm that results. The conclusion? NO DIETS unless medically necessary. And simply being of higher weight? Not medically necessary.

• We often think we know about so much more going on in the world because we see social media from Palestine and Ukraine. But we still miss so much. Like 6% of the entire population of the Central African Republic being killed in one. Single. Year.

Where have I been?

So many places! A lot of things I’ve been working on for a long time have come to fruition!

• I got to be on the Peculiar Book Club, and it was such a lovely fun experience and someone WROTE A SONG FOR THE BOOK!!!

• I also got interviewed by one very smart high school student for her school paper about RATS. She did a great job and you should read her feature.

• I got to write for AARP about depression in older adults! It doesn’t look like you think, and many people can be more impaired by moderate depression than their younger counterparts.

• I also wrote for AARP about why there aren’t good treatments out there for Alzheimer’s. The answer is that we honestly still don’t know what causes the symptoms, making most drugs a guess at best.

• And I wrote for Science News about an AWESOME new study where a single invasive ant changed what a lion hunted for dinner. The ant disrupted a key ant-plant mutualism, leaving acacia trees undefended against elephants. The elephants tore down the trees and opened the savanna, leaving zebras with better sight lines against lions. The lions…had to switch to beef. Really.

Anti-Discourse Actions

This year, I am staying out of Discourse. I am tired of zigging and zagging from platform to platform like a zebra on the savanna, constantly bugling alarm about all the lions. In the end, we keep leaving, the lions take over, and we end up somewhere worse, steadily running out of grassland. I am tired of having to start over and over again from scratch, using all my time and energy dodging and weaving as more and more bad actors as discovered. I am tired of scolding and fleeing, ceding more and more real estate to bad actors. I’m trying to remember that zebras have teeth, a nasty temper, and a good strong kick. And when sightlines are good, lions only succeed 22 percent of the time. So instead of Discourse, I am saving my energy for taking action. This week’s actions:

1. I reached out to my local state assembly member about a state bill! Local action matters!

2. I continue every week to post on Substack’s office hours, asking them to take a stronger stance against hate, to make more people feel welcome.

3. I’m still on about a hyperlocal issue. I’ll ping them every week if I must!

4. I voted in a survey on another hyperlocal issue to make sure my voice is heard somewhere it matters, not on the internet.

5. Another doggie sweater is off! Someday I’ll even remember to take a picture.