This Turkey Tuesday is about staying safe while you sleep. Unlike many ground-dwelling birds, wild turkeys sleep on elevated roosts at night – they do this primarily to protect themselves from ground-dwelling predators that typically hunt at night, such as bobcats and coyotes. And during winter, turkeys will sometimes select certain roosts that allow them to deal with severe weather conditions such as cold and high winds. Turkeys will roost in a tree alone, but it’s not uncommon in areas with limited availability of quality roost trees to see many birds in the same tree. Regardless, although roosting above ground at night does offer safety and protection, it’s not a guarantee that an individual bird will survive until morning. Ongoing research combining GPS telemetry with tri-axial accelerometers has revealed that a relevant percentage of mortalities occur while turkeys are roosting. For toms, 43% of mortalities linked to predators occur at night while birds are roosting. And outside of times when hens are nesting and brooding and are therefore confined to the ground, 47% of mortalities occur while those hens are roosting in trees. In the 3rd image, you can see several days of data where a tom moved around each day (green and blue lines), became relatively stationary each night, and then suddenly on that 3rd night around 4 am gets killed on the roost (red arrow) – great-horned owls are the primary culprit in these mortalities. The take home is elevated roosts are critical to wild turkeys as they provide a measure of safety while birds sleep at night, but even sleeping above ground doesn’t guarantee protection.
Pic of tom by Casey Lyons, flock on roost by Monte Loomis.
