They're baaaack....

Many of us have reported seeing turkey hens and babies in the backyard the past couple of weeks.  This is a welcome sight because turkeys became extinct in Minnesota in the 1880s, probably due to over-hunting and loss of habitat and food supply as more people settled in the midwest.

How did they make a comeback?  In the 1970s Minnesota DNR traded walleye, prairie chickens, ruffed grouse, and hungarian partridge (an introduced species) to Missouri and neighboring states for wild turkeys, allowing them to get re-established in woods and fields far from agriculture.  Apparently the climate agreed with them, or at least they tolerated the frigid, snowy winters and the tropical monsoon summers to thrive well enough to allow their population to increase markedly.  Now there is both a fall and spring hunting season on them in MN, and I know some Minnesotans brag about the great taste of a wild turkey at Thanksgiving.



In April this year, a handsome Tom and his three lady friends visited the bird feeders in my backyard, picking up the leftovers the birds and squirrels had missed.  We saw them a couple of times this spring, but it was a long time before we saw them again in early July when a herd of females marched across the backyard on their way to the woods.  Last week, two hens brought their new and not-so-new chicks through the backyard to feast on the insects in and around the wildflower garden.  They were too shy of me trying to take their picture to pose nicely and made a beeline for the deep woods at the back of the yard.



I could only see 6 or 7 chicks, of two different ages in this bunch, and since Turkeys lay about 8-10 eggs in their ground nest, a lot of the babies must have been gobbled up by foxes, raccoons, or possums.  Baby turkeys, like chicks, are precocial, which means that they can run almost immediately after hatching, quite unlike the baby robins which are like limp noodles for the first 4-5 days of their life.  They can also feed themselves, which makes the hen's job mostly protection.  This is probably also the reason that hen turkeys raise their young together, forming flocks of up to 30 birds of varying ages in the midsummer.



Turkeys eat  a variety of insects, seeds, and young, rapidly growing weedy plants through the spring and summer, so they are a help to your garden in getting rid of weeds and pests.  In the fall their diet switches to nut crops, like acorns, which allows them to put on a thick layer of fat to help them survive winter cold.

Turkeys CAN fly, even though Toms may weigh up to 20 pounds!  In fact, with those powerful breast muscles (that we like to eat) they can zoom over tree tops at 55 mph. They roost at night in trees, which keeps them safe from the nocturnal ground predators.