This Turkey Tuesday is about the importance of agricultural areas in densely forested landscapes. In these landscapes, the availability of open plant communities is often lacking – but agricultural fields can provide quality forage, display areas, and depending on the practices in place – they can also provide nesting and brooding habitat. Turkeys leave winter flocks and go to breeding areas each spring, and they have a strong fidelity to these areas, so they return each year unless there are drastic alterations to them. You can see what this movement looks like in the 2nd image, which shows the movements of a hen as she leaves her winter flock in late February and moves ~ 4 miles to a property with open fields grazed by livestock. Interestingly, another hen from the same flock exhibited identical movements. The 3rd image shows the fields themselves, along with the nest locations – not only did this hen intensively use the fields and field borders, but she attempted 3 nests as well – all failed. Although clearly these fields offered vegetative communities that the hen sought, this scenario is one I see commonly as I travel and view landscapes where turkeys live. That is, the value of one property is undermined by a lack of management of the surrounding landscape – in this case, dense unmanaged forests surround the fields and residential development has consumed adjacent land as well. The take home is these data show a clear example of how the management and land practices on one property are impacted by activities occurring elsewhere and speak to the need to seek management solutions that extend across property boundaries to have the greatest impact on wild turkeys.
Pic of tom by Brock Rolsten.
