This Turkey Tuesday is about summer brood surveys, which are used by many states to infer annual reproductive success. If you’re a turkey hunter, you may live in a state where the state wildlife agency asks you to participate in brood surveys during summer, wherein you’re asked to record sightings of wild turkeys. These surveys typically run from June through August depending on where you live, and although these surveys are referred to as “brood surveys”, they really are much broader than that. That’s because agencies usually ask us to record hens with poults, hens without poults, the relative size of poults, and even toms. So why do agencies ask us to help collect this information? Well, these surveys can be conducted across the geographic extent of a state, whereas intensive field studies where birds are marked and their reproductive success measured cannot. More specifically, the poults observed per hen (poult-per-hen ratio) give a broad assessment of productivity that spring/summer, and the proportion of hens observed with a brood gives a metric of nest success. Likewise, the poults observed per brood provide an index of poult survival, and tracking relative sizes of poults within broods helps agencies infer hatching dates across broad spatial extents within and across states. Collectively, when evaluated through time, these data give agencies insight into population trends. In fact, summer brood survey data have been used to predict total spring harvest and the percentage of jakes in the next spring’s harvest. So, the next time you’re asked to consider participating in summer brood surveys, give it a shot and see whether you can offer useful information from your neck of the woods. The take home is summer brood surveys, which are now being standardized across many states, offer a powerful tool to track trends in wild turkey populations.
Pic by Ali Seber
