This Turkey Tuesday is about the odds, or the likelihood of something to happen – in this case, of staring down the gun barrel at a mature tom. Have you ever wondered what the odds were that a poult that hatches ends up living to adulthood, where we’d harvest them as a tom? Connecting pieces of information from multiple ongoing studies tells an interesting story. One, across broad areas of the south and east, only about 25% of nests hatch, on average. Two, of those nests that hatch, ~60% of broods fail to survive. Three, if you put these figures together, you realize that single digit percentages of nests produce poults that end up joining fall flocks. Four, once poults survive to be jakes, a percentage of them are lost to predation and some are harvested. Five, emerging data from several sites with heavy hunting pressure is revealing that sex ratios of clutches that hatch are already skewed towards females – in fact, <40% of hatched eggs are male poults. Why? We’re unsure, but a plausible explanation is that hens adaptively adjust sex ratios in their offspring, which has been shown in other critters. If you’re interested in this recently published work, go to wildturkeylab.com and click on Research. And lastly, what’s the odds of staring down the gun barrel at a tom sporting a paintbrush of a beard like this one?! The take home is, the odds of a hen producing poults that survive to be toms are long, so cherish each encounter you have with one.
Pic by Steve Gulledge
