This Turkey Tuesday is about bearded hens. Each spring, you see images and videos on social media of bearded hens, and typically the comments section is full of inaccuracies and misconceptions. Why do some hens have beards, whereas most do not? Well, all wild turkeys regardless of sex have a papillae – that’s the specialized part of the skin from which the beard emerges. A small percentage of hens simply have a beard that emerges from the papillae, and the beard is usually shorter and thinner than a tom’s. Do bearded hens nest and produce poults? Absolutely yes, as shown in this video! Bearded hens are just like other hens in our populations from the standpoint of producing poults. Do bearded hens produce toms with multiple beards? There’s no published data showing this to be true, but you do tend to see the occurrence of bearded hens be higher in some places than others, so perhaps there’s a genetic link. Lastly, in some states, the harvest of bearded hens is legal, which often prompts turkey hunters to ask why. In many ways, allowing hunters to harvest bearded hens during spring is a relic of decades old regulations – back to days when we only needed to verify the bird had a beard rather than ensuring the bird was a male. There really is no biological reason to harvest a bearded hen, or any hen for that matter, so the allowance to harvest bearded hens is socially focused rather than biological. The take home is bearded hens contribute to productivity in our local wild turkey flocks, just like hens without beards.
Video by Danny White.
