Maryland Park Service Training Blog: Gobble, Gobble!

Photo by Teddy Fisher (MNCPPC)

Thanksgiving is right around the corner and I thought it would be appropriate to talk about one of Maryland's smartest (and tastiest) game birds. If you guessed turkey, you are correct!

There are five different subspecies of Wild Turkey in North America and luckily for us, Maryland is home to one of them. In Maryland we have the Eastern Wild Turkey and we are fortunate enough to have them in every county in the state. They weren't always as plentiful as they are now. The National Wild Turkey Federation (NWTF) and the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) worked together to trap and relocate them all over the state back in the late 70's and 80's.

Wild Turkey 2016-2017 Annual Report

Turkeys were once thought to need expansive tracts of forested land to survive and flourish but we have learned over the years that they are actually very adaptive birds. Because of all the building and human encroachment, turkeys have adapted to living in smaller wooded areas and agricultural tracts of land, even in suburban areas!

In the summer months, you can find turkeys in grassy and overgrown fields looking for insects and hiding their newly born babies, called poults. In the fall and winter, they are most likely looking for food in forested areas. They eat acorns, leaves, buds, seeds, fruits and insects. It's common to see them in open fields digging for insects after a rain storm passes through.

Wild Turkey photo by Lori R. Bramble

The breeding season is March through May. During this time, like most birds, the male shows off his colorful plumage to attract the female birds. An adult male turkey (also called a gobbler) develops a variety of red, white, and blue colors on his head during the breeding season. He will have a beard that protrudes from his neck and spurs that vary in length on the back of his legs. He puffs out his chest and feathers and struts back and forth to put on a show for the female. The adult female turkey (called a hen) has dull plumage in comparison to the male. The female is only about half the size of the male, weighing in at about 10-12 lbs. Hens lay about 9-12 eggs, called a clutch. The clutch has an incubation period of 26-28 days. Poults are very vulnerable when they are young, and only about 50% of them will survive the predators and weather.

To communicate, turkeys use a variety of different sounds. The gobble is the most common but they can also cluck, purr, yelp, and putt to signal danger or just to communicate with the flock. They have color vision that is 5x more acute than humans, and can fly up to 50 mph (the reason some hunters say they are tricky to harvest). If you find yourself lacking conversation at the dinner table on Thanksgiving, feel free to entertain your guests with some turkey talk!