This Turkey Tuesday is about poult adoption, where a hen actively broods’ poults that are not her own. Gamebirds like wild turkeys are not well known for adopting offspring they didn’t produce, but this interesting situation has been observed a number of times in wild turkeys across multiple subspecies. Within weeks of hatching, hens that hatch poults will often flock together with other hens that have poults, or amalgamate, which is a sort of safety in numbers approach. The more eyes to watch for danger, the more likely the flock and those poults survive. This behavior results in us seeing brood flocks now that have poults that are not the same size and clearly are different ages. When hens within these flocks are killed, remaining hens will adopt those hen’s poults, but research has shown more classic adoptive behaviors. For instance, several researchers including myself have observed unexplained instances where a hen has a known number of poults with her for weeks and is then observed multiple times with more poults that are either clearly younger or older than her poults. If you look closely at the poults in this image, this hen definitely has poults of different ages with her. How this happens is unclear, but it’s likely that individual poults survive predation events that killed the hen that hatched them and end up joining another brood nearby. There are also records of multiple hens flocking with their poults and then separating from those flocks with poults they didn’t hatch following them. The take home is the brooding behaviors of wild turkeys are complex, and as is typical with many other behaviors, vary across individuals.
Pic by Don Flamion
